TGMC Case Study: A Social Business Assessment of GBS

Introduction
Group Business Software is a Premier IBM Business Partner and a leader in cloud technology, solutions, and services for IBM Lotus software. The company boasts more than 4,000 customers worldwide with more than 4 million users of their products and services. GBS has offices in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Toronto, London, Manchester, Copenhagen, and throughout Germany. Its European headquarters is in Frankfurt, Germany and North American headquarters is located in Atlanta.

1. What is your definition of Social Business?

At GBS, we think of Social Business in terms of a business that is fully leveraging all of the power that social tools, social media, and social networks have to offer. We see Social Business in two ways. Internally, leveraging Social Business practices would allow us to gain insight from all internal resources and leverage that previously untapped knowledge to create additional value within our company. Externally, we value our customers feedback so engaging with our customers in real time using Social Media enables us to better serve their needs and ensure that our products and services are aligned with the markets needs. We are all familiar with how people are using social media such as Twitter and Facebook for greater value in their personal lives. The big question for business is how we can take advantage of this new social framework to improve our business relationships, sales efforts, company culture, product development, customer support, brand loyalty, and much more.

2. Is GBS a Social Business? Please explain...

Why dont we send out a Tweet to our customers, employees, partners, suppliers and stakeholders to find out? I guess thats my round-about way of saying that the best way to answer that question is to reach out to the community of people that we are engaged with to find out what they think. My personal assessment would be that we are on the road to becoming a social business but we are not quite there yet. We have taken a number of steps to become more engaged with our community through online conversations and dialogues. We are trying hard to improve our communications and our transparency to the outside world, as well as enable employees across our organization to communicate more effectively across departments and functions. And we are using some of the real-time insights to help us make better and faster decisions. But, in all honesty, if social business is an iceberg that we are exploring, I dont think that weve truly grasped what is below the waterline.

3. What types of tools are you currently using, and how do you use them?
If I were to look at the social business tools that we are currently using, I would have to admit that we are using the tools that are available in a limited way. I would breakdown the categories of tools as: online communities, blog technology, social media marketing and social media monitoring. In regard to online communities, we have deployed IBM Lotus Connections internally. This is an environment in which employees can share ideas, meet fellow employees, get answers to questions, find resources, and centrally store information. So that we can engage with the Lotus Community including prospects, customers,

and fellow experts we also have a public instance of IBM Lotus Connections called Bleed Yellow. This allows us to collaborate on different level to help improve our portfolio. Regarding blog technology, we have over 10 active bloggers at GBS and they are using a variety of technologies to deliver their blogs. They blog internally, as well as externally and many have quite a large following in the Lotus Community due to their expert perspectives and knowledge. These blogs are useful in maintaining our position as knowledge leaders. They allow us to showcase the expertise of the top minds in the industry as well as promote our events, products and services. On the social media marketing front, we are using all of the standard tools, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What we are lacking, I think, is how we can get the most out these tools. We currently do not have a defined social media strategy would help us plan and measure our effectiveness and impact within the social media world. Ideally, with our social media presence, we hope to be able to use these channels to effectively engage with the community as well as promote our products, services and events. In addition we hope to recruit newcomers to the Lotus brand and help increase its following and show how powerful it can be as a platform. In summary, we see social business tools as an important component to our social business strategy, but we need a solid corporate-wide strategy to utilize all the components to their fullest and ensure appropriate return on investment.

4. What are the forces driving Social Business adoption at GBS?

Our marketing team recognizes the power that social business offers and has been successful in getting the executives on board in harnessing this power. The key factors driving GBS towards Social Business are the ever-present need to achieve better business results without a significant cost increase, so being able to leverage the Internet to share information and collaborate without having to pick up the phone, especially when dealing with our global resources, is very cost effective. Being a global company, the need to communicate across time zones and in different languages is important. Employees are motivated to share information using social software knowing that there is a time difference and often questions arise after an office is closed or before one opens. Being able to search and find information online keeps the business productive and alleviates lost time due to geography. Building a better knowledge sharing framework across departments makes the business run smoother. Staying competitive and continuing to pioneer technology is very important to GBS. Having a place for prospects, customers, and partners to openly communicate with us will allow us to keep this advantage, moving forward. The market has been moving in this direction, so we feel it is a necessary move to adopt these technologies and strategies to remain innovative in the industry. We have noticed a few obstacles with the adoption of social business at GBS. They include changing the mindset of employees to understand and embrace the ideas behind knowledge sharing and establishing a companywide strategy for the use of all of the different technologies to reduce knowledge fragmentation.

5. Can any GBS employee engage externally with partners, suppliers and customers?
The short answer is Yes they can. GBS has a public facing instance of IBM Connections called Bleed Yellow. This is open for anyone to join simply by supplying a valid email address and password. Many of our employees, partners and customers are already members and we encourage membership and collaboration using this resource. Much of our staff has Blogs hosted on Bleed Yellow. In addition to IBM Connections, there is an IBM Sametime server established that will allow any members of the Bleed Yellow Community to engage each other via instant messaging simply by adding this to their Sametime server communities. This

proves very useful in staying connected and getting real-time input from partners and customers alike. In addition to that we have presence on many of the popular social media sites.

6. You mentioned social media, to what extent is GBS leveraging social media?
GBS has established a presence on the more popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube. Currently, we are using Facebook to promote events and updates related to our products and their promotion. We are using Twitter to engage with customers at conferences and to promote our products and services. YouTube has been coming in handy for creating digestible content for customers and prospects in regard to Webinars, product demos and promotional videos. With a heavy population of employees and customers in both Germany and across North America we have accounts in both regions and the posts are made in the language native to the region they target. More recently we have established a presence on Foursquare and are looking at that as another way to leverage social media to promote our brand, stay connected, and reward loyalty.

7. Internally how are social business tools used to increase productivity and collaboration?
We utilize IBM Connections and IBM Quickr. Within Connections we have created portals and groups for different areas within our company. We have encouraged all employees to create profiles within Connections so their skills and expertise are known to everyone in the hopes that theyll be able to create their own crossfunctional working groups. It now takes us under a week to form a team to respond to a business need. We have also utilized the blogging function of Connections and updates are posted there; things like newsletters, press releases and any other sort of information that is pertinent. Recently weve been using these social business tools more because they are being adopted by team leaders and executives who want to get familiar with the new tools. Were also using them more because employees are now more used to interacting and collaborating with online tools and the ease of use that the tools now offer make them usable throughout GBS.

8. Do you measure your social business presence? If so, what are the results you see?
Our social business presence here at GBS is just beginning. We are just starting to establish ourselves on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. However, we are mentioned in Social Media on a weekly basis. We are hoping to increase engagement with existing and potential customers, partners and employees. Our Klout score has been pretty steady so were hoping to get that number up in the coming months. As far as other results, we havent really been consistent about collecting metrics for our social business practices. We will gather and analyze results from individual campaigns and efforts but as of now we do not have a standardized process for handling that sort of thing.

9. In what direction do you see your social business strategy moving? Have you considered using the IBM developerWorks Connections platform?
We see our social business strategy moving to a more organized and standardized approach. Currently, with our geographic fragmentation and recent acquisitions we are trying to find the best ways to implement social business and stay innovative in the industry, but not trying too much too fast. We are also trying to ensure we increase our engagement with prospective customers, current customers, business partners and employees in a manner that will help us to increase sales. We are evaluating utilizing IBMs developerWorks. We currently have our own internal installation of Connections and our own public community, BleedYellow. More information on GBS.