About the Book
Winning social business techniques for product managers, marketers, and business leaders!
• How product managers at IBM are using social business to transform markets and build vibrant global communities
• New best practices for promoting engagement, transparency, and agility
• A deeply personal case study: handbook, roadmap, autobiography, and inspiration
Does “social business” work? IBM has proven unequivocally: it does. In Opting In, IBM executive Ed Brill candidly shares best practices, challenges, and results from his social business journey, and shows how his team used it to transform existing products into thriving business lines.
This deeply personal extended case study offers you a detailed roadmap for achieving and profiting from deep customer engagement. Brill shares his 15+ years of product management experience at IBM and describes how these techniques and experiences have developed a vibrant marketplace of social business customers worldwide.
You’ll learn how to use social business tools to strengthen customer intimacy, extend global reach, accelerate product lifecycles, and improve organizational effectiveness. You’ll also discover how social business can help you enhance your personal brand—so you can build your career as you improve your business performance.
With a Foreword by Marcia Conner, Author and Principal Analyst at SensifyWork.
Using today’s social business tools and approaches, product and brand managers can bring new products and services to market faster, identify new opportunities for innovation, and anticipate changing market conditions before competitors do. In Opting In, IBM’s Ed Brill demonstrates how product managers can fully embrace social business and leverage the powerful opportunities it offers.
Brill explains why social business is not a fad, not “just people wasting time on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube,” and not just for marketers. He shows how to drive real value from crowdsourcing, interactivity, and immediacy, and from relational links across your organization’s full set of content and networks.
Drawing on his extensive experience at IBM, Brill explores powerful new ways to apply social business throughout product, service, and brand management. Using actual IBM examples, he offers candid advice for optimizing products by infusing them with the three core characteristics of social business: engagement, transparency, and agility.
Drive breakthrough product, service, and brand performance through:
Engagement: Optimize productivity and efficiency by deeply connecting customers, employees, suppliers, partners, influencers…maybe even competitors
Transparency: Demolish boundaries to information, experts, and assets—thereby improving alignment, knowledge, and confidence
Agility: Use information and insight to anticipate/address evolving opportunities, make faster decisions, and become more responsive
Table of Contents:
Foreword xv
Preface xviii
Chapter 1 Why Social Business? 1
A Social Business Is Engaged 4
A Social Business Is Transparent 6
A Social Business Is Agile 7
Social Business and Earned Success 8
Lessons Learned 8
Endnotes 9
Chapter 2 The Social Product Manager 11
Enter the Social Product Manager 13
Analyzing an Analyst’s Report 14
Social by Policy 20
Sales and Marketing Viewpoints 22
The Social Product Manager’s Direct Feedback Loop 24
Lessons Learned 26
Endnotes 27
Chapter 3 Self, Product, or Company 27
Painting a Self-Portrait 30
Positioning Product 35
Representing the Company 41
Lessons Learned 44
Endnotes 45
Chapter 4 Offense or Defense 47
Situation Analysis 48
Timing 52
Volume and Amplification 55
Anticipation and Unintended Consequences 59
Lessons Learned 61
Endnotes 62
Chapter 5 Picking a Fight 63
You Can’t Please All of the People… 64
Entering a Fray 68
Make Some Enemies 73
Lessons Learned 75
Endnotes 76
Chapter 6 Activate Your Advocates 77
Leadership 78
Content Versus Curation 78
Identifying Influencers and Providing Recognition 81
Continuous Feedback 85
Truth in Use 88
Lessons Learned 91
Endnotes 91
Chapter 7 Tools of the Trade 93
2011 IBM CMO Study and the Importance of Customer Insight 94
Inbound Social Networking Tools 95
Outbound Social Networking Tools 103
Forums and Feedback Sites 110
Lessons Learned 112
Endnotes 112
Chapter 8 In Real Life 113
Amplify Your Message 114
Develop Community and Individual Relationships 116
Make Friends 123
Lessons Learned 127
Endnotes 128
Chapter 9 Social Inside the Organization 129
Intersecting Organizational Goals and Social Tools 130
IBM as a Social Business 132
Measuring Return on Investment 138
The Impact of Social Tools on Product Development 140
Who Needs to Participate? 143
Lessons Learned 144
Endnotes 144
Chapter 10 Risk Management in Social Business 145
Risk of Reaching the Wrong Audience 146
The Public Apology, and the Risk of Emotion 148
The Risk of Subset Population through Language and Other Demographics 151
Risk of Identity Challenges and Imitations 152
Internal Risks 154
Lessons Learned 155
Endnotes 155
Chapter 11 Putting Opting In into Practice 157
A Day in the Life 158
Using the “Lessons Learned” 160
The Social Product Manager of the Future 163
Next Steps 166
Conclusion 170
Appendix A IBM Social Computing Guidelines 171
Introduction: Responsible Engagement in Innovation and Dialogue 172
IBM Social Computing Guidelines 173
Detailed Discussion 174
Endnotes 179
Index 181
About the Author :
Ed Brill is Director, Product Management–IBM Social Business solutions.
Brill is responsible for the product and market strategy for IBM’s messaging, collaboration, communications, and productivity products, including IBM Notes/Domino, IBM SmartCloud Notes, IBM Sametime, IBM Docs, and other related social business solutions. Brill’s focus is on extending and growing the success of these solutions through customer engagement, partner ecosystem development, and harnessing the breadth and depth of the IBM organization.
In 18 years at IBM, Brill has led a variety of sales, marketing, and product-related organizations. As Director for Social Business, Brill has succeeded in elevating IBM’s expertise and reputation in brand and product management. He has constantly innovated in both marketplace strategy and product execution.
Previously, during Brill’s role as Business Unit Executive–Worldwide Sales, his suite of products posted year-to-year quarterly growth for four years and gained thousands of new customers. Earlier in his IBM career, Brill led competitive strategy and held several product management and strategic marketing roles. Brill’s technical background includes development of infrastructure deployments through project management and IT architect roles. Committed to understanding the global marketplace, Brill has visited IBM customers in more than 40 countries, and is a frequent speaker at IBM and industry events worldwide. Brill has served on the advisory boards for Web 2.0 Expo and IDG Mobile Enterprise Next.
Outside of IBM, Brill is an active Chicago community member. As a 25-year resident of Highland Park, Illinois, Brill authors “Highlands and Ravines,” a regular opinion column on community news website Patch.com, and previously wrote for the Chicago Tribune’s TribLocal.
Brill holds a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing from Indiana University, with a minor in political science.
Use the following to connect with the author online:
Blog: www.edbrill.com, named a Best Blog for Buyers by Network World
Twitter: http://twitter.com/edbrill
Facebook: http://facebook.com/edbrilldotcom
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/edbrill Opting
