Werner Kruck, Chief Operating Officer, Security First Insurance Company

By Werner Kruck

You may think of Twitter and Facebook as a way to catch up on the latest gossip, but social media often becomes a critical lifeline and communications channel after a natural disaster. In addition to using it to locate loved one­s, friends and emergency resources, people affected by a natural disaster often turn to social media to contact their insurance company for information and to start the claims process. Homeowners insurance companies must prepare for the reality that today’s policyholders will use any means available to connect with them, including posting a question or comment on the company’s Facebook page or Twitter account.

Florida homeowners insurance companies are extremely prone to the challenge of dealing with disaster in a socially connected world – Florida has more property and people exposed to hurricanes than any other state in the nation. As the fourth largest homeowners insurance company in Florida, Security First Insurance Company understands the importance of adapting to the widespread use of social media and leveraging modern technology to improve the recovery process for our nearly 180,000 customers. As a result, we have partnered with IBM and Integritie, an IBM-business partner, to develop Social Media Capture, Control, Communication, and Compliance (SMC4).

SMC4 integrates social media and email communications, and using IBM Smarter Analytics with Enterprise Search technology and IBM Content Collector for Email, the system automatically prioritizes and routes incoming requests to the appropriate employees based on the content of the message. SMC4 enables  Security First Insurance Company to effectively manage a high volume of requests we anticipate to receive after a hurricane and improve the response time to our customers. SMC4 also uses IBM FileNet Content Manager software to archive all communication for compliance review. 

The challenge for companies responsible for assisting customers after a disaster in a socially connected world is capturing and prioritizing all incoming messages and developing a quick and appropriate response. According to the American Red Cross, at least 76 percent of the general public would expect assistance to arrive within one to three hours from posting a request for help on a social media website. Built on IBM software, SMC4 eliminates silos and redundancy—expediting the resolution process for policyholders and allowing us to follow through on our promise to be there for Floridians storm after storm, year after year.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, mobile computing, smarter mobile computing, smarter social business, social media

Larry Bowden, Vice President, Web Experience Software, IBM

By Larry Bowden

 When people talk about “social” adoption, the conversation usually doesn’t shift to government. But maybe it should.

 Today a growing number of cities and counties are embracing social technologies to create “Smart Communities.” According to the World Foundation for Smart Communities, these are communities that make a “conscious effort to use information technology to transform life and work within a region in significant and fundamental, rather than incremental, ways. This transformation is beneficial to the community and attracts local participation and cooperation among community groups, government, business and education.”

 At its core, a Smarter Community has the ability to deliver exceptional “citizen experiences” and services – something the City of Windsor, and the County of Essex, Ontario, are doing right now.

For more than 10 years, the Center for Smart Community Innovation at Canada’s University of Windsor has been working on a Smart Community initiative involving those entities to provide citizens accurate information about all of the services within the region. Through social networking, the city and county now provide a single access point that connects citizens and organizations with detailed information about available services, matters of interest in the region, and guidance for citizen interactions and community projects. As a result of creating a more connected community, the Windsor-Essex region was designated as one of the “Top Seven Most Intelligent Communities” in the world by the New York-based think tank, the Intelligent Community Forum.

Across the globe, the Government of National Capital Territory, Delhi (GNCTD) was also interested in creating stronger, more consistent links with its citizens. With 180 departments, many of which had websites that were either hosted by the NationalInformaticsCenter or a third-party vendor, GNCTD struggled to keep the sites – and its information – up-to-date. In fact, some websites went without updates for as long four years. The stale data was a constant source of frustration for citizens who often were trying to find necessary information.

Through the creation of new social media solutions, GNCTD was able to unify all of its sites into a single portal for improved accessibility. In addition, the organization gave each department access to its own website and the ability to make updates to their content easily and quickly, without having to master any specific technical skills, such as HTML. Through these efforts, visits to the government portal nearly doubled within six months, while the cost and time for website development and maintenance decreased substantially. At the same time the Delhi Government was able to leverage the new social environment to create and deploy new programs and services cost-effectively.

As each day passes, more government entities are plugging into social technologies to help ensure exceptional experiences for their citizens. The explosion of information, increasing usage of mobile devices and the cultural shift towards social networking and analytics has citizens looking for – and expecting –exceptional web experiences and services.

Technorati Tags: City of Windsor, County of Essex, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Smart Community, smarter government, smarter social business, social government, social media

Gary Swale, Director, Knowledge Dimension, an IBM Business Partner

By Gary Swale and Sandy Carter

Small businesses can no longer ignore the impact of going social.     

In fact, more than 6.1 million South Africans are on Facebook with 100,000 new members registering each month, generating 800 million updates every day.

While large corporations all over the world are leading their countries forward with rapid innovation and expansion, small businesses are playing a vital role in grassroots economic development. Small businesses provide a platform for wider employment and economic opportunity at the local level and, like the small stores and vendors supporting the large anchor store in a mall, the local support larger corporations need to function.

South Africa’s small businesses are no different.   

Sandy Carter, Vice President, Social Business, IBM

There is a wide consensus among economic thinkers that small businesses act as the fuel to power South Africa’s economy. The national government is seeing the huge potential of small businesses, and has initiated efforts to invigorate this sector.

To more efficiently engage employees and customers, and improve sales, small businesses are applying social technologies to collaboration, communication and content management – the connected web of people and assets that impact a given business goal or outcome. These social technologies are then amplified by social media, from blogs and social networking sites to content communities, to reach the most influential audience for maximum brand impact.

Unlike many developed countries, mobile devices play a more critical role in how the social messages are disseminated. By 2016, it is estimated that there will be one billion mobile phones in Africa, and mobile Internet usage in Africa is among the highest in the world.

As a result, significant opportunities exist in South Africa for small businesses to build more social businesses. Small businesses are discovering innovative ways to educate, manage their business and engage with potential customers via mobile networks. That is empowering people in all the diverse ethnic and economic strata that is unique to South African society. If you combine Africa’s mobile internet proliferation with the natural willingness to tell and share stories, the enduring spirit of ubuntu which means I am, because we are, will prevail in any South African social business success story.

Yet small business success in South Africa requires more than tools and technology. Small businesses need to re-imagine business with a social mindset.

Even in today’s highly socialized world, many small South African businesses dismiss the potential of social business, either relegating the idea to the exotic realm of Internet marketing or ignoring the buzz of social marketing as a passing fad.

Now we are seeing that way of thinking changing as South African boomers become more digitally savvy, millennials permeate the workforce and social media becomes a part of daily life.

In other words, South African small business doors are now open for social business.   

Social business can shift a small business’ dynamic from isolation to engagement within seconds by providing vehicles for discovering, growing and propagating its products, services and expertise to local consumers. This shift requires small businesses to take a more active approach to social. Small businesses can establish their own online town square to encourage and monitor interaction with consumers via the social sphere.

In many ways, the balance of power has shifted from the business to the individual. Technology has made it easier for consumers to discover and participate in social networks, to impact both brand perception as well as brand reality – how a small business creates, presents and maintains its content, authenticity, integrity, reputation, commitment and follow-through.

Conversely, a small business can rely too heavily on new-fangled social business methods, and forget how to engage customers on a personal level.

A small business’ best marketing remains a friendly face behind the counter. Social business methods have been the trick to increasing the number of customers on the other side of the counter, either real or virtual.

These mobile social business methods have been most effective in South Africa, and have set an example for the rest of the world’s small businesses.

Technorati Tags: africa, Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, mobile computing, smarter social business, social business, social media

Harriet Fryman, Director of Market Strategy, Business Analytics, IBM

By Harriet Fryman

Big Data and analytics are to the IT industry what action hero movies are to the motion picture business. Each is hugely popular, lucrative and has its own subcultures. In fact, organizations that are not thinking of how to leverage Big Data and analytics today could be left in the dust tomorrow by organizational heroes that do take action.

IDC published a recent report that forecasts the Big Data market will reach $16.9 billion by 2015, up from $3.2 billion in 2010, seven times the estimated growth rate for the overall information technology marketplace. Organizations in all industries are under increased pressure to extract new insights and optimize business processes from this data explosion, and transform this overload of information from a threat into an opportunity.

Ultimately, it comes down to being an “action hero” inside of your organization – someone who leverages the power of analytics on Big Data and leads the way for their organization’s success.

Every day decisions are made in every part of an organization, and by every employee, looking to accomplish their own goals and gain their own perspectives. Each decision has the opportunity to increase the value for the consumer, and increase revenue for the organization. So why are more than 70 percent of organizations still not using Big Data and analytics for decision making?

Perhaps the action hero effect has not taken hold of them yet! So how do they find a way to save the day? Consider these three steps to get started:

• Create a plan – focus on the business problem first, not the data.

• Mobilize resources – understand the skills available to do the analysis and the tools needed to capture all forms of data.

• Put Big Data into action – embedding the results of your analysis directly into the business process. After all, it’s what you do with Big Data that actually matters.

Once these steps are taken, these next-level actions should be explored and considered:

• The quick analysis of Big Data to find what is relevant, and the ability to fold those findings together with current data sources like social media and sensors.

• The storage of Big Data to be used as a way to build predictive models to reduce churn and identify fraud.

• Delivering the results of the analysis directly to front line workers, such as call center agents, who can then be guided to make the right decisions for each customer interaction.

These initiatives help turn agents into action heroes, instead of simply call takers. They become relationship builders, sales agents and a profit center with the ability to address customer needs, up-sell, cross-sell, and increase customer lifetime value.

Take for instance IBM client Telerx – by harnessing analytics technologies and adopting a more holistic approach to multi-channel customer interactions, Telerx has moved into a new space: consumer intelligence and research. The analysis of unstructured text data from social networks and call center notes, as well as near real-time transcriptions of customer phone calls, enables Telerx to offer its clients new insights into consumer behavior.

Embedding analytics services into its contact center offerings puts Telerx in a position to gain significant competitive advantage over rival service providers. Social media analysis helps predict “hot topics,” enabling Telerx to set appropriate staffing levels and brief its contact center teams before customers start calling.

Organizations on a Smarter Planet are applying analytics to listen and learn from what people are saying and what sensors are telling them. The ability to rapidly identify patterns, spot unusual activity, and use information to inform every part of the organization are all important competitive advantages.

Action hero movies all represent one very important thing – triumph. So I encourage everyone to be the action hero, and lead the charge in big data and analytics success in their own organization.

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I’ll be continuing the conversation on Facebook on Friday, April 19th at 8:00 a.m. EDT. To join the chat, please visit: http://on.fb.me/XovmSJ.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, retail, smarter analytics, Smarter Planet, social business

Graham Kittle, Leader, Business Analytics, IBM

By Graham Kittle

Today as more and more companies embrace Social Business they are quickly learning that social networks are more than the new water cooler where people congregate to talk about their weekend, share pictures of the kids and reviews of movies. These networks have the potential to be something far more powerful, a business’s new “production line” that is based around knowledge. However, instead of turning steel into aeroplanes we are turning ideas into innovation.

This picture of employees lined up on a production line, working together to develop the next great idea came to mind when I was reading a post by my colleague Jonathan Ferrar. The article, titled “The Hunt for Talent: How Social and Analytics are Reinventing the Art of HR” focuses on the never ending search to find the best of what looks to be a shrinking pool of talent.

As Jonathan states in the article, success today requires human resource leaders to trade in some outdated hiring practices in favor of new social business capabilities that have the power to quickly and easily identify the right people for the right jobs at precisely the right time to create the 21^st Century Workforce. 

These new capabilities include the use analytics where executives shift from gut-based decisions to fact-based decisions that leverage data and deliver real insight. The practice is largely untapped but as more and more areas of an organization experience the vast and valuable array of insights that are offered by this social/big data combination, including HR, that is changing and fast.

What I’d like to focus a little more on today is what comes after the offer letter has been signed. That’s right, hiring the right people is just the beginning. To use a golf analogy, the winners in this hunt for talent, the ones who get to sport the “green jacket,” are those who have a strong long game and a good short game. Translation: bringing on a talent is one thing, but unleashing their knowledge and expertise is another.

Today’s business winners succeed because of their people. These are the minds that drive innovation and unearth the next big idea that vaults the company forward. According to the 2012 IBM CEO Study, “Leading Through Connections,” 71 percent of CEOs cite human capital as their greatest source of sustained economic value. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that companies are maximizing each asset.

For example, in the age of the global business, where great ideas can come from any corner of the world, what happens when employees don’t have an outlet to share their thoughts?  We have all experienced this scenario.  What happens when that light bulb goes off and there is no one there to see it, to help nurture it and bring it to life? That’s right. Nothing.

This is where social business enters the discussion.

Today’s social networks are the businesses’ new production line, where employees, partners and clients connect with each other to share vast amounts of knowledge about an endless number of things. On the other side are businesses who—with the right tools—can identify new chances to innovate by doing the following:

Capture the insights of employees: What are people talking about? Which topics are getting the most support and from who? Don’t just look at the thought leaders in your corporate office but everyone, from Atlanta to Australia and beyond.

Analyze the knowledge this social network creates: Good ideas can come from anywhere, whether it’s a first year data analyst or a veteran programmer. Don’t just see what topics are trending but look under the hood at why. Engage those involved and get their insights and guidance.

Share ideas throughout the business: Every business must be committed to promoting ideas that could accelerate innovation, out-market competitors and make it to the top of the mountain.

Leverage social to more deeply engage with customers and reach new audiences: Social networks offer the opportunity to remove boundaries both in attracting talent as well as tapping into it and bringing its ideas to life to build a Smarter Planet.

So I ask, is it time you trade in your virtual water cooler for a social production line?

If you are interested in hearing more about how businesses are already seeing tangible results from social business, such as improving efficiency, productivity, time to market and market exposure, take a look at IBM’s new TV ad. Incidentally, I appear in the TV ad and talk about that experience in my photo journal on the Social Business Insights blog.

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For those who would like to keep this discussion going. Please join me between 4:00 pm EDT on April 10 and  8:00 am EDT on April 11 on Facebook.com/PeopleforaSmarterPlanet to share your thoughts and successes on bringing out the best in your employees, creating a smarter workforce and using data to maximize your organization’s social business opportunity. Please RSVP today.

Mitzie Hunter, CEO, Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance

By Mitzie Hunter

Like many city-dwellers worldwide, residents of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) have reached an impasse. Our congestion problems are getting worse and worse, and we now have some of the longest commuting times in North America. Congestion is not only taking a toll on our economy and our environment, but also on our health and our quality of life.

IBM’s Social Sentiment Index research pulled tens of thousands of tweets about traffic from five major cities across Canada. The exercise homed in on what our residents feel is most important—not surprisingly, Toronto’s commuters were the most active to vent their opinions. Toronto had 10,000 tweets about traffic over an 11-month period, 40 percent of which were explicitly negative. By contrast, only 20 percent of tweets in Halifax were negative.

In the GTHA, through CivicAction’s Your32 campaign, we’ve been reaching out to all commuters—drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and transit users—to learn what a better transportation system would mean to them. We’ve been driving people to our website, your32.com, and to twitter, and asking a simple question: “What would you do with 32?” Thirty-two represents the number of minutes, on average, commuters in the region will save if the approved transportation plan, The Big Move, is funded and built over the next 25 years. The Big Move is the region’s plan for an improved, fully connected transportation system across the GTHA.

Through their responses, people have been painting a picture of the human cost of congestion—the toll congestion is taking on our lives by sucking away the time we could otherwise be spending on the things that matter. Things like eating healthy meals, going to the gym, or spending time with our families.

But we’re also finding that people are inspired by the idea of what a better system could bring: time to finish that novel they’ve been working on for years, to learn a new language, to take on a new hobby, or to explore more of what our amazing region has to offer.

When it comes to solving our congestion problems, smarter transportation is part of the solution. Employers can play their part by offering staff incentives for carpooling and taking transit, or by being open to flexible hours and telecommuting.  Smart commute networks can also help employers promote smarter commuting choices. New technologies and demand management mechanisms, from computer modeling, to crowd-sourcing, to intelligent traffic lights must also play a role – and we’re sure to see new and exciting innovations in the decades to come to maximize our road capacity and our transit system.

Many cities are exploring these opportunities now. But while these technologies can play a role in solving our congestion woes, what we need more than anything is better physical infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure in Canadian cities—and especially in the GTHA—has been chronically underfunded for decades. We’ve far exceeded the capacity of our current network, and with the estimated nearly three million people—a population the size of greater Montreal—moving into the GTHA over the next 25 years, things will only get worse. Unless we start building now  the upgraded, expanded, multimodal system that we need to make up for lost time and to plan for the future.

Fixing any city’s congestion crisis won’t happen overnight; it will take time, money and commitment to make up for decades of neglect and delay. But the need to act has never been so clear, and the cost of inaction has never been so high.

As we act, we should be guided by an overriding vision of smarter networks that better connect us to the places we want to go, and that provide us with more choice in how we get there. New technologies and attitudinal changes are part of the answer, but unless the public and decision-makers accept that we all have to pay for a better system, to build the new infrastructure that we need, the human cost of congestion will affect us for generations to come. While we continue to innovate and design a better future, it’s time to get moving on building The Big Move.

Join the conversation in the GTHA: visit your32.com, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, Crowd Sourcing, IBM Smarter Planet, IBM Smarter Transportation, IBM Social Sentiment Index, innovation, smarter analytics, smarter traffic, social media, social sentiment, Toronto

Ari Sheinkin, Vice President, Client Insights, IBM

By Ari Sheinkin

Imagine an office full of static and noise. You hear YouTube blaring over bad speakers, competing with a dozen mobile calls and an in-person conference that’s interrupted by constant knocking on the door. And in this mayhem, you’re listening for one voice: the one whisper from one client talking about their experience or preference or plan.

CMOs face their own daily mayhem of data as they try to engage with customers as individuals. Marketing to industry segments and broad demographics is being replaced by the “era of you.”

Much of the data deluge comes from consumers via searches, clickstreams, mobile phones, and comments on Facebook and Twitter. Combine that with data about in-store traffic, conversations with call centers, and updates from suppliers, and today’s marketers confront a blitz of data waiting to be analyzed and acted upon to boost business.  Better insights enable companies, from retailers to banks, to literally design offers and services tailored to what consumers are telling them.

We all buy into the vision. But the question I keep hearing is, how do I prepare? How do take advantage? How do I start?

The answer I give marketing organizations is to embrace marketing science.  That point of view is the topic of a new study, Marketing science: from descriptive to prescriptive, just released by the IBM Center of Applied Insights.

Marketing science addresses the common misconception that with Big Data, clever computers will automatically capture all the required information and spit out answers. To the contrary, insight begins by asking the right questions and thoughtfully gathering information to support the analysis.

That means marketers need to become marketing scientists. They should start developing three core skills that may be new – architecting data, applying science and influencing action.

According to the IBM study, traditional marketers collect a great deal of data, but only 28 percent say they consistently structure information for analysis and availability across the enterprise.  This unplanned approach won’t glean the kind of insights marketers crave, from what consumers are saying on social media about a new fashion trend, to whether the supply chain can support a spike in demand for ice cream based on an unexpected heat wave.

On the other hand, marketing scientists “architect” data to make it easier to analyze. Drawing on a wider range of sources, they structure and organize data in a more granular form that is digestible, dissectible, and easily retrieved.

With the data in hand, it’s logical to assume that marketing science will begin.  However, less than 20 percent of traditional marketers and analysts regularly use scientific approaches in their jobs. They don’t develop hypotheses or benchmark against control groups. They are more likely to rely on gut feel and past experiences, rather than on analytics.

Those organizations will be left behind — or worse still, paralyzed by the volume of the noise. To grab the data-driven future, we all need to instill the processes and skills of science and experimentation into our marketing work.

Even with the best science, there’s no point predicting the future, unless you’re able to act on it. Here again, marketing scientists are ahead of their peers. They are investing in organizational change, learning how to use science to influence action – and moving beyond data mayhem.

For example, marketing scientists are nearly three times more likely to collaborate with the rest of the enterprise – from the CIO to the head of HR — both to share insights and to help everyone apply findings.  They are effective at selling their insight on how to optimize a client touch point or how the company can better engage with customers on social channels. And marketers need help applying the insights – 82 percent of traditional marketers still rely largely on hunches and experience.

Marketing science can transform the way marketing professionals make business decisions. It can inject more discipline into the marketing process, enabling marketers to ask – and answer – complex questions they could never otherwise address.

Guided by these insights, CMOs can anticipate the future and begin to listen to their customers as individuals – and move beyond the data mayhem.

Where do you see yourself or your marketing organization? Do you rely solely on experience or are you incorporating rigorous scientific approaches? How are you handling the vast amount of data you have access to? Do you have the influence, the sales skills, to transform your marketing organization? We’d like to hear from you!

Add your comments below or tweet us at @IBMCAI

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, Center for Applied Insight, CIO, CMO, IBM, mobile, social business, social media

Erick Brethenoux, Director, Business Analytics and Decision Management Strategy, IBM Software Group

By Erick Brethenoux

CMOs would do well to heed Ernest Hemingway’s time-tested advice: “When people talk, listen completely.”

For some time, brand strategists have been underscoring the importance of listening as a strategic mainstay for brands seeking to delve into social media.

To this day, I believe that thoughtful, inquisitive listening – to public commentary like tweets, posts and the range of online data that we, as individuals, share as a way of expressing ourselves – is one of the smartest investments a marketer can make.

The sky is the limit in terms of the kind of data marketers can listen to today. From online reviews that consumers post and contributions to forums, to creative self-expression on Pintrest and, of course, succinct yet expressive tweets – all of these are Big Data insights that, together, form a true narrative of what makes customers tick.

However, a cursory glance of a sentiment chart, a highlights reel of brand mentions from your agency, or even a month by month count of total tweets is not enough.

At this point in time, CMOs should ask themselves: Is my organization merely listening, or is it listening completely?

I had the chance to illustrate the concept of using analytics to listen completely and uncover consumers’ emotional triggers in Advertising Age‘s first-ever data issue. The article explores an emerging practice known as finding your “kin,” in which CMOs don’t just uncover what makes one consumer tick; they uncover what makes 100 consumers tick, one heart beat at a time, and find the link between all of them.

And if you’re wondering what exactly it means to listen completely, consider the following scenario.

Imagine yourself as an excited consumer who is one month away from a hiking trip in the lush forests of Vancouver Island. As you prepare for the vacation, you know it’s essential to have the right hiking boots to keep your feet dry, protected and firmly planted on the tundra, should you come across a slippery rock formation.

So what do you do?

You begin your search online, perhaps combing Amazon for top-rated boots and reviews to justify the ratings. You turn to your trusted outdoors blogs for product recommendations. You tweet to your friends and your cousins for advice, and post in your favorite forums, to boot (pun intended). And then you visit the website of the brand to which you’ve narrowed down your search, to look at specs and pricing.

But these are boots, so the virtual trail is not enough for you. As an avid hiker, you know it’s time to visit the brand’s retail store to try the boots on for size and comfort. You enter the store, go straight to the wall of boots, and try on the pair you’ve been researching.

And then you buy a lesser brand’s boots because they are cheaper.

Something was missing in this process. You, the consumer, clearly did your homework. You clearly stuck your neck out in the online version of town square, to seek out opinions and ask the right questions. But in the end, there was an emotional trigger that compelled you to eschew your online learnings and act in the interest of your wallet.

But what if the brand you had been researching all this time had, in turn, been listening to your calls for advice? Imagine if that brand had put in the same amount of knowledge-seeking as you did, listening to your public posts, tweets, reviews, comments and content shares.

Empowered by Big Data-driven insights, that brand could have known that the emotional trigger that would supersede your proclivity for choosing the cheaper option is the trusted advice of a fellow hiker; and one who has braved the rocky trails of Vancouver Island.

And with those findings, the brand could have served up a personalized e-invite to a retail store location near where you work, where a helpful store clerk named Bill will be waiting to tell you all about his recent trip to Vancouver and which boots he selected for his weeklong hiking excursion.

That – is listening closely and using data-backed findings to create a personalized, meaningful experience for your customer.

It’s why at IBM, we believe the death of ‘average’ is underway and a new era of ‘You’ is upon us.

Personalization, based on listening to what consumers say about themselves as people, is the key to effective brand engagement. We live amidst a wealth of public data where customers are living, breathing archives of personal expression.

But the most crucial step to targeting your marketing efforts is vetting consumer data carefully through marketing analytics technology and a disciplined eye. This practice of listening completely will reveal the emotional triggers that could compel your consumers to buy or click, comment, share, visit and endorse.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, CMO, IBM Smarter Planet, Social, social analytics, social business, social enterprise, social media

Charaka Kithulegoda, CIO, ING DIRECT

By Charaka Kithulegoda

It’s estimated that there are more smartphones on the planet than humans. By 2016, more than 10 billion smartphones will be in use around the global. And Canadians are leading that growth, with more than half of Canadian smartphone users banking from their mobile device – and that number grows even higher when looking at those between 18 – 34 years of age.

Our customers expect to be able to connect with their friends and family, browse and shop and of course, bank from their mobile devices. As the mobile marketplace continues to grow and expand, mobile banking is not just a convenient option for our clients, but a must have. So how do we provide our customers with easy access to their money at any time, wherever they are?

Working with IBM, ING DIRECT Canada has developed a long-term, secure strategy around our mobile architecture supporting multiple devices. This has allowed us to fast-track the delivery of mobile banking applications for all mobile devices. For example, our iPad application, developed with IBM, has a dashboard view that users can customize based on their frequently-transacted activities.

But we not only embraced mobile banking, we took it a step further and embraced social banking – providing our customers the ability to bank and transact from wherever they are and this includes social applications like Facebook and Twitter.

Our Facebook application, for instance, makes banking easy and secure. Customers can go from chatting with friends to checking out their accounts with the click of a key. Our customers were already logged onto Facebook, interacting with friends and family. Why make our clients log out, just to log back into our mobile site? Instead, we made it easy for our customers to bank where they already are.

Social banking has also helped us encourage our customer to save, through a program called Small Sacrifices. In a recent survey, we found that 52 percent of Canadians said that if they were able to better visualize what foregoing their daily, weekly and monthly spending on non-essential purchases looked like, they would save them over the short and long term, they would change their spending habits.

With client preferences at the heart of our business, we helped our customers visualize how cutting out everyday indulgences, — i.e. Small Sacrifices — could lead to big savings over the long term. It’s simple, but very effective. First, users choose what small sacrifice they can make, like passing on a daily coffee purchase. Then users decide which goal to redirect the money to, like their retirement fund or savings account. Once the user specifies how much money they spend on their average, Small Sacrifices creates a chart illustrating how much could be amassed in five- and 25 years by saving that amount weekly. The next time a user is tempted to spend on their non-essential purchase, they can choose to instead redirect that money to a savings or retirement account with one simple click.

At ING DIRECT, we understand that mobile technology is here to stay. It’s changing how we live our lives by helping make everyday tasks easier and more convenient.

Clients are telling us what they want and how they want to use our products and services. We have embraced this rapid evolution by providing open and engaging solutions that offer immediacy and simplicity through a highly contextual experience.　

Technorati Tags: IBM Smarter Planet, mobile applications, mobile banking, mobile computing, smarter banking, social banking, social business, social media

Craig Hayman, General Manager, IBM Industry Solutions

By Craig Hayman

Since IBM launched its Smarter Commerce initiative two years ago, we’ve seen companies across industries transform the way they buy, market, and sell products and services.

Why? Because they’re learning that the consumer – and we’re all consumers – is increasingly in charge.

The term “Chief Executive Customer” comes to mind. More and more customers are using social networks, mobile devices, Web sites and influencers to make their buying decisions. There’s a digital explosion out there, and there’s no turning back. This is a $130 billion-plus market opportunity.

Marketers today continue to be confronted by a daily flood of customer data waiting to be sifted for nuggets of intelligence, everything from Internet searches to purchase histories to twitter comments. IBM research estimates that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day – so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

That’s a pretty daunting statistic. The good news? As “Big Data” emerges as a prized asset for organizations to drive growth and innovation, the marketing department is becoming the wealthiest and perhaps most influential business unit. In fact, Gartner says that by 2017, the CMO will have greater control of the IT budget than the CIO. Big Data – and by proxy the CMO – will influence product development, supply chain operations and virtually every strategic area of an organization.

Slowly but surely over the last two years, we’ve seen leading companies as diverse as financial services and retail chains bringing IT to bear on marketing goals. CIOs and CMOs have stopped looking at their differences and instead are focusing on the benefits of their combined strengths for their organizations. And it’s not just marketing. Line-of-business buyers and non-technical teams are also taking matters into their own hands and achieving some impressive ROI through technology instead of relying just on the CIO.

wehkamp.nl, the Netherlands’ largest online retailer, developed a customized retargeting campaign that develops unique sales offers for consumers in real time. The cloud-based IBM Smarter Commerce solution tracks a potential customer’s browsing history, comparing their behaviors against established models. From this analysis, the company can then offer unique discounts and product recommendations through targeted banner ads and email campaigns. The company has experienced a 271 percent higher sales-per-send ratio for marketing emails, including a 23 percent higher open rate and a 68 percent higher click-through rate, and a 500 percent increase in the click-through rate for its banner ads.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) has transformed its global supply management processes with IBM’s cloud-based procurement solutions. Part of the Smarter Commerce initiative, IBM’s procurement solutions were deployed across AB InBev’s global enterprise – which includes operations across six geographic zones and a portfolio of more than 200 beer brands. This has enabled the company’s eSourcing strategy to achieve significant breakthroughs in supply chain visibility and efficiency. eSourcing enables AB inBev to ensure process consistency and auditability around the world with its supply base, helping the brewer complete more than 25,000 electronic auctions with beer suppliers such as grain millers, spice makers and bottlers, in seven different languages in one year alone.

These companies and many others are taking a Smarter Commerce approach to selling by gradually reorienting the entire business model — from how a company approaches innovation to how it designs its operations — based on deep customer and market insights.

If we’ve learned anything over the past two years, it’s that textbook marketing today is about understanding customers, meeting their needs, and doing so in a way that builds trust. CMOs have to piece together information that customers share in order to understand them on an individual level – as a “demographic of one.” Companies need to invent new ways to engage with people beyond merely selling products and services. CMOs also need to understand how a company’s values and purpose impact the brand and consider the company’s culture as part of their portfolio.

The true value with Smarter Commerce is connecting all the key processes such as marketing, sales, procurement, supply chain, and customer service to make the business flow smoothly and efficiently. One size does not fit all, however. IBM’s long-term strategy is to continue to develop and offer integrated Smarter Commerce solutions that address the specific buy, market, sell and service functions that make up the overall commerce process.

It’s this combination of Big Data, cloud, mobile and social business – all enabled by technology – that lies at the heart of better business performance for companies in 2013 and beyond.

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