Tis' the Season for Sharing: My Top 10 Sites for 2011

At OpenText, as well as in my personal life, I spend a lot of my time offering advice to our sales teams, my co-workers and friends on Social Media. I am often asked things like; how do I get started; how can I be successful and why should I do this? 

For those of you that have asked, I thought I would compile my top 10 list of sites that I use for research and advice. I also threw in a few sites that I use for fun as well. I hope you enjoy, pass it on and share your own, as it is the season of sharing.

For Advice and Research:

1.    My number one site for research this year was Twitter. I am thankful to my 507 sources of very insightful information. Feel free to take a look at my follow list here: https://twitter.com/KimberlyEdwards#/following

2.    I get very inspired by Gary Vaynerchuck’s talks. http://garyvaynerchuk.com/ I am in the midst of his book “Crush it!” and I love it so far; so much that I am having my Book Club feature it this month.

3.    This is a great site for Social Business advice. Of course AIIM is  a great source for all content management needs. http://www.aiim.org/community/social-business

4.    I am very visual learner; this is a fun site and full of great content. http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

5.    Great articles that can help you get started with social initiatives. http://www.thesocialworkplace.com/

6.    Great visuals that can help provide you with stats about Social Media to share.

http://www.designfools.com/how-to/55-interesting-social-media-infographics/

7.    If you are ever left with some time to kill or need to be ispirded, take some time to listen to a few TedTalks.

Here are a few talks that have inspired me in the past:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/david_cameron.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html

For Fun:

8.    My work environment is very open, so I like to plug in the tunes so that I can focus my thoughts and fuel my energy with music. This is my favorite music site for streaming music. http://grooveshark.com/

9.    Shopping, of course I would not miss this - as this is my passion, after work of course ;-) www.etsy.com

10.  The last one is for those that own the iPad. My favorite app right now is http://www.zite.com. This is a personalized magazine that customizes your content as you read based on your likes and dislikes.

Happy holidays and all the best for the New Year!

The Importance of Measuring Social Business to Fuel the Customer Experience

This is a cross post from @CMS Wire posted here.

Social business is about connecting users, partners and customers through purposeful conversation and collaboration and most importantly; it’s about integrating or weaving social media into our existing business functions to help build a more collaborative infrastructure.

Social Business Driving Engagement

While often hard to measure, social business has productivity impacts that can be felt by IT, Sales, HR and many other areas in the organization — see Infographic (reg required) — but the real impact, and where the ROI can be best shown, is the increased engagement your internal and external audiences have with the communications initiatives that you invest in.

The key to measuring this increased engagement is ensuring you have the right tools and strategies in place to help monitor, react and respond to these initiatives in real time.

By analyzing real-time visitor and social interaction information (both inside and outside the firewall), organizations can help to optimize online initiatives and identify actionable trends within their visitor base, and capture user events that are specific to business goals.

The Impact of Social Analytics

The power in using Social Analytics is enabling the business to use the data to make recommendations to the business about how things are working, or not, and how they can be improved upon, both for your users and your customers.

Social analytics, from an external view, provides a window into things like how people perceive your brand and how they are responding to your corporate products, services, and marketing messages.

Internally, social analytics provides a window into things like; what is the most engaging content on my intranet; how many people are commenting on our blogs; what the tone of those comments are and who the most influential people in my community are.

Social Analytics can become the vehicle that helps your business translate data into insights. It can help improve your customer experience by writing better targeted content, can provide sentiment analysis, create higher converting sites and reshape a user’s site navigation to improve the overall online experience — just to name a few!

For a concise summary of cross-department benefits, download the Infographic here.