HorizonWatching

Top 25 Most Popular Consumer (B2C) Branded Facebook Pages

I’ve been busy doing lots of research into how social media is being used by corporations.  I thought I’d share with you one piece of analysis I’ve done on B2C Branded Facebook pages.

As I’ve discussed here before, social business is an important emerging trend for corporations.   Many companies are past the experimentation stage on Facebook and are utilizing that platform as a way to build communities of customers into fans and advocates.

This table below documents the most popular B2C Branded fan pages on Facebook.  The table provides the number of fans and the URL for the top 25 pages.   The information was collected in mid October 2011.

Top 25 Most Popular Consumer (B2C) Branded Facebook Pages

#.	Product/Brand	Fans	URL
1	Cocacola	34,643,972	https://www.facebook.com/cocacola
2	Oreo	23,142,657	https://www.facebook.com/oreo
3	Redbull	22,472,071	https://www.facebook.com/redbull
4	Skittles	19,382,918	https://www.facebook.com/skittles
5	Pringles	15,720,653	https://www.facebook.com/Pringles
6	Monster Energy	12,429,566	https://www.facebook.com/MonsterEnergy
7	Ferrero Rocher	12,252,965	https://www.facebook.com/FerreroRocher
8	Nutella	11,397,566	https://www.facebook.com/Nutella
9	Dr Pepper	10,631,556	https://www.facebook.com/DrPepper
10	Starburst	10,020,345	https://www.facebook.com/Starburst
11	Nike Football	8,969,053	http://www.facebook.com/nikefootball
12	Starbucks Frappuccino	7,744,417	https://www.facebook.com/Starburst
13	Mountain Dew	6,116,553	https://www.facebook.com/mountaindew
14	Pepsi	5,966,034	https://www.facebook.com/pepsi
15	5 Gum	5,412,955	https://www.facebook.com/5Gum
16	Sprite	4,584,408	https://www.facebook.com/Sprite
17	Kit Kat	4,508,596	https://www.facebook.com/kitkat
18	Gatorade	4,218,322	https://www.facebook.com/Gatorade
19	Slurpee	4,175,892	https://www.facebook.com/Slurpee
20	Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts	3,432,172	https://www.facebook.com/kelloggspoptarts
21	Kinder Surprise	3,299,680	https://www.facebook.com/kindersurprise
22	Nike Basketball	3,180,994	https://www.facebook.com/nikebasketball
23	Lay's	3,072,879	https://www.facebook.com/lays
24	Vitaminwater	2,913,825	https://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater
25	Wonka	2,870,596	https://www.facebook.com/wonka

 

Observations

• These brands invest time in developing an inviting Facebook experience.
• Many of them have built extra features into their Facebook pages, including contests, games, recipes, discussion forums, videos, pictures, etc.
• Most of these companies interact well with the fans, asking questions of them or providing posts that encourage the conversation.   This interaction keeps the fans coming back to the site and participating.

Learning about the Social Business trend: Three IBM White Papers

I’ve written before about the social business trend and it’s impact on businesses (see The Social Business Train Is Leaving The Station Are You On It? and A Social Business Strategy Can Make A Company More Responsive and Agile). 

I believe that the social business trend will have a profound impact on the architecture and design of future businesses.  Business processes will change and that will lead to required changes in application software.  Those businesses that make the successful transition will be more agile, more responsive, and more successful than others.

This post provides links to three white papers found on IBM’s Social Business website.  IBM has been on the forefront of the social collaboration and social media marketplace, learning how to leverage these technologies internally.  These white papers provide a great overview of social business, the potential value of the trend, and the challenges all businesses must overcome to become a true social business.

The Social Business: advent of a new age

(February 2011) This 10 page white paper written by the Lotus team at IBM Software Group defines what a social business is and what it takes to become one.  It puts forth the view that businesses are entering an inflection point where social computing and social media are about to be fully integrated into enterprise application design.  The table of contents are: 

• Introduction
• What does it mean to be a Social Business?
• What is the value of Social Business?
  • Deepen customer Relationships
  • Drive operational efficiencies
  • Optimize the workforce
• Preparing for the future
• The right partner for a changing world
• For more information

Becoming a Social Business: the IBM story

January 2011)  This IBM-sponsored 14 page white paper was written by IDC’s Erin Traudt and Richard Vancil.  In this paper, IDC provides three case studies that describe IBM's internal evolution to a social business.  The paper then uses the learnings from these case studies in order to provide guidance to other large organizations considering making the transformation to a social business.  

• IDC Opinion
• Methodology
• In This White Paper
• Situation Overview
• Case Studies
  • IBM DeveloperWorks
  • From Individual Contributor to Community Manager
  • BlueIQ
• Future Outlook
• Challenges / Opportunities
• Conclusion

 

Jamming on social business

(April 2011) Exploring new approaches for the next era of business.  This IBM white paper provides a review of the key findings from a 72-hour online brainstorming session held in February 2011 between over 2,700 participants from over 80 countries.  This report summarizes the key insights gathered from the all the conversations, comments, and tweets. 

The table of the contents of this report reads as follows:

• The Social Business Jam
• What is a Jam?
• Jam insights
  • Building the social business of the future
  • Building participatory organizations through social adoption
  • Using social media to understand and engage with customers
  • What social means for IT
  • Identifying risks and establishing governance
• Our jamming experience
• Next Steps

If you are tasked with learning about the social business trend, these three white papers are an excellent resource for you.  More information and case studies can be found at the IBM Social Business website.  For those of you who want to follow the discussion on Twitter, search on the hashtag #socbiz.

Slides: How IBM Enables A Social Workforce

This week I have been attending WOMMA’s School of WOM in Chicago.  The conference started on Monday and wraps up today.  There have some great keynotes, workshops, and breakout sessions.  I’d estimate roughly that there are about 300 attendees.

On Monday, Susan Emerick of IBM (@sfemerick), Chris Boudreaux of Converseon (@cboudreaux) and I presented during a breakout.  Our presentation, “Enabling the Social Workforce” discussed how IBM has been able to enable thousands of employees to participate in social media.  At IBM, employees are such an extension of our brand and it is important that IBMers represent our brand in the social media.

Most businesses are finding it challenging to mobilize employees in social media on behalf of the brand.  For years prior to the social media explosion, IBM had focused on enabling IBMers to collaborate internally via collaboration tools.  As social media took off on the public Internet, IBM has, in turn, successfully enabled thousands of employees to participate in the social media conversation. 

The presentation (loaded on slideshare and then embedded below) discusses how IBM advances the goals of the business while growing the professional influence of the employee. The key to enablement for IBM is focusing on empowering the workforce to communicate their strategic expertise socially.  Our presentation and the Q&A session afterwards covered important program elements like

• Developing the Digital Strategy Model
• Publishing and Communicating Social Media Guidelines
• Developing a Social Computing Curriculum that includes certification-based training
• An Expertise Locator system that helps aid in the search and discovery of IBM experts
• IBM’s Centennial Program that enables social conversations.

Enabling the-social-workforce 09-may2011

View more presentations from Bill Chamberlin

Leveraging Social Media and Communities for Foresight

Last Wednesday evening I delivered a keynote presentation at an end of the year student event at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendozza College of Business MBA program (http://business.nd.edu/). 

The students are all required to take a class in Futures Studies and this was their end of year event.  During the late afternoon Poster Session that was held in the atrium of the Mendozza building, they all assembled and displayed posters that communicated the results of their semester long projects.  The topics covered a wide variety of subjects, from the future of Electric Cars to Solar Technology, to how to solve water irrigation in Africa.   In all there were over 50 projects from teams of 4-5 students.   I was impressed with the students projects and the level of research, analysis and insight generation that went into the poster presentations.   I learned a lot just by walking from poster to poster.

After the poster session was done, we all assembled into the auditorium where I delivered my keynote to the students “Leveraging Social Media and Communities for Foresight”.  The deck has been uploaded to my HorizonWatching account on Slideshare and is also embedded below. 

During the keynote, I discussed how the emergence of online social media and communities is transforming communication around the world.  The shift from traditional institutional-led communications that is relatively controlled by a small number of companies to an era where any individual can create and publish content is a shift that is transforming the way individuals learn, collaborate, and create content.   This has a ripple effect across all business professionals and certainly is impacting the way we research, analyze and develop insights about emerging trends, technologies and issues impacting businesses and individual citizens.

I provide the students with my personal story of how I’ve led an internal IBM community called HorizonWatch since early 2001 and how I started blogging internally in 2006.  I also discussed my public social community effort called HorizonWatching.   Both efforts have helped me do a better job of scanning for emerging trends and then developing insights from those scanning activities.

I ended the talk with some advice to the students on how they could get started leveraging social media in their own careers.  My main advice was that they should all think about taking control of their personal online brand.  As they are soon to turn their attention to job searching, now is the time for them to think hard about what their digital brand looks like to recruiters and potential employers.  But after the job search is over, I believe those who will be successful in their careers are the ones that will figure out ways to leverage social media and communities to build their expertise.

As this was their last day of class, they were all eager to go out and celebrate, so the Q&A session was short and sweet.  However the 5-6 questions raised were smart and right on topic.  I wish all the students good luck and best wishes over the summer and challenge them to begin using social media and communities as a strategy to better understand the future(s).

My presentation is embedded below.

HorizonWatching: Leveraging Social Media and Communities for Foresight

View more presentations from Bill Chamberlin

Enterprise 2.0: The Value of Online Communities

The trend of building online Communities of Practices and Customer Communities is an important trend I’ve been watching (and leading/participating in) for a number of years.  I often get asked:  What is the business value of online communities? 

Unfortunately community platforms are lacking tools for community leaders that would allow us to track and measure the impact that these communities have on business results.  So it is a very subjective measurement today.  Note to community platform vendors:  Community Leaders need better dashboard tools.

I have established a graphic that I use to explain the power of communities and the value it can generate to an enterprise.  The story line to the graphic goes something like this:  Community Participation leads to increased Enterprise Knowledge, which leads to improved Organizational Capabilities, which results in positive Business Value for enterprises.  

Here’s my stab at a graphic (Note:  Click on the picture to enlarge and reformat)

(Click on picture to enlarge) 

Do you have any better graphics, reports, or slide decks that illustrate the business value of communities?  If so, please let me know!   For some resources I’ve uncovered on the value and ROI of social media and online communities, check out my previous post:  Learning About The ROI of Social Media and Online Communities

Leveraging Social Media: 12 Steps To Develop Your Personal Online Brand

Do you have a plan on how to leverage the social media trend in order to achieve your career objectives?

Are you taking part in the online conversations that are happening on the topics that are important to you and the development of your career?  Or are you on the sidelines when it comes to participating in online communities, social networks, etc?   

If you are not part of the conversations that are important to your career, you can’t learn from those conversations.  Nor can you influence those conversations.  And in the future when potential employers look online to see if you have participated, they will not see you.

You are responsible for how you are perceived online. If you are not managing your online brand, then it is being shaped for you (perhaps by those pictures your friends are posting on Facebook).  

The following 12 steps can help you take control of your online personal brand.

1. Document Your Career Goals.  Have a balance of short term and long term goals.  For each goal, think about how participating in online communities and social networks could help you achieve those goals. 
2. Document Your Top 4-5 Career Related Topics.   These are the most important topic domains that you need to master in order to become an authoritative source of information a subject matter expert for the duration of your career.   Think about the topics that you can remain passionate about for a long time.
3. Analyze Your Existing Social Network And Online Presence. How does your current social network and online presence align with your documented goals?  How can you build stronger ties and increase your ability to learn? 
4. Master The Online Productivity Tools.  You need to have a good foundation in order to maximize your ability to collaborate online.  These new social tools can help your collaboration efforts be more productive.  Spend time educating yourself on how to use Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc. 
5. Research / Collect Information.  Learn where the online sources are for information related to your 4-5 main career topics.  Visit these sites often.  Collect and maintain a master folder of documents, resources, Web links, etc., which have been helpful to you.  You will want this for step 11 below.
6. Document Where The Buzz Is Online.  Check out my social-search bookmarks on delicious and learn how to search the social media.  Search on each of your 4-5 career topics you listed in step 2 above.  Document where the online conversations are happening for those topics.   Document who are the most influential online people.  Find out where those influential people are hanging out online.  Maintain a list of URLs (suggest you book them on delicious).
7. Join Online Communities.  For the topics that are important to your career goals, join the most active online communities, groups, and networks.  Connect with and then ask members where else they connect with like-minded people.
8. Move Your Conversations Online.  For the topics that are important to your career goals, cut down on email conversations and increase your online conversations in those places you’ve identified above.
9. Manage Your Personal Online Brand.  Take control of your virtual online presence.   Establish and keep all your profile(s) updated.  Make sure that when people look for you online…which they will…information about you is current and accurate.  Your effort here is all about helping you achieve the goals documented in step 1 above.
10. Connect With The Community Champions.  ‘Friend’ the most active people in the online communities that are important to your career objectives.  Connect with them on LinkedIn and Twitter.   Follow their blogs, tweets, and community posts.  Post replies to their blogs and retweet their Tweets.  Share insights with them and point them to your online content.
11. Share Your Knowledge Wealth.  For the communities you have joined, increase your online conversations.  Post comments in discussion forums and on blog posts.  Share your bookmarks.  Share the insights and opinions you’ve formed as a result of your efforts in documenting where the online buzz is.  Save time by organizing your centralizing all of your thoughts on each topic area into document templates with URL links to those sites, blog posts, etc., that you feel are the most important.
12. Establish Yourself As An On-line Authority.  Establish and maintain a presence on all sites where your 4-5 career topics are being discussed.  Be a visible and active participant in the most important communities.  For the topics that matter most to your career, establish your own online site/blogs/communities.  Link to other authoritative blogs and communities often and continue sharing your insights and opinions on those sites as well as developing your own site.

Don’t sit idle on the sidelines. Take responsibility for your future and get involved in the online conversations happening about the topics you are passionate about.  You have important ideas to share with the rest of us.  We will all learn from your experience, thoughts, and content.

Six Social Media Trends for 2010

David Armano recently provided a post on his personal blog, Logic "+ Emotion, that he titled:  Six Social Media Trends for 2010.  Armano is part of the founding team at Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design services. 

Armano lists the six most important social media trends for 2010 as:

1. Social media begins to look less social. 
2. Corporations look to scale.
3. Social business becomes serious play. 
4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced).
5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline. 
6. Sharing no longer means e-mail. 

You can check out Armano’s full “Six Social Media Trends for 2010” blog post at  http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/11/social.html

Google's Top 20 Twitter Accounts

Here’s a list of the top twenty Google Twitter accounts, based on the number of followers that ID has. 

Notes: 

• The following information was pulled on October 20, 2009. 
• #DLSP represents the number of days since last the last post on Twitter.
• The columns might not match up with the column headings all that well.  Seems to depend on the browser.

Category	Account	Description	Followers	Tweets	#DSLP
General	Google	Google's main account	1,780,160	774	0
General	YouTube	for YouTube fans	163,883	1,101	0
General	GoogleReader	from Google's feed reader team	29,952	209	15
Ads	AdSense	for online publishers	29,931	103	5
General	GoogleNews	latest headlines via Google News	24,699	2,333	0
Earth	GoogleMaps	uses, tips, mashups	22,509	534	0
General	Blogger	for Blogger fans	22,248	461	0
General	GoogleVoice	updates & info on Google Voice	21,174	134	7
General	GoogleAtWork	solutions for workplace productivity	18,724	891	0
Developer	GoogleResearch	from Google's research scientists	14,637	66	61
General	GoogleCalendar	user tips & updates	12,972	93	0
Developer	app_engine	web apps run on Google infrastructure	12,880	176	5
Developer	GoogleCode	For Google developer products	10,638	88	6
Developer	GoogleIO	Google's largest annual developer event	8,830	258	0
General	GoogleStudents	news of interest to students	8,819	273	0
Earth	GoogleEarth	updates from the Google Earth team	7,724	130	0
Ads	GoogleAnalytics	insights for website effectiveness	7,552	33	4
Culture	googlejobs	the voice of Google recruiters	7,324	173	1
General	iGoogle	Google's personalized homepage	6,674	89	5
General	GoogleImages	Google visual image search	6,483	28	72

A Unique CrowdSourcing Event: The Smarter Cities Scan

Do you live in a large urban city or in one of the sprawling suburban environments on the fringes of a large city?

I wanted to make you aware of a really interesting collaboration / social media project launched recently in support of the Smarter Cities effort.  And I wanted to ask for you to participate if you have some time...and/or...ask you to invite people in your network that might want to participate.  Anyone interested in improving the quality of life in large / sprawling urban environments is invited to participate. 

The social media brainstorming project is called the Smarter Cities Scan (http://smartercities.tumblr.com).

For this exercise in collaborative innovation and hive intelligence to succeed, significant numbers of people need to contribute their diverse thinking over the next few months.  That will generate the very large, complex data set that can then be analyzed and processed into a useful model that can then be used to improve urban environments. 

You can find more information on how to participate is attached below.  For more detail behind this project, you can point people to this post   The Smart Cities Scan:  Let's build an open model with shared imagination and deep analytics

How to participate in the Smart Cities Scan

• From the homepage – http://smartercities.tumblr.com – simply click on Post Your Ideas to start contributing images, video, links, quotes, text or any combination of all of these.  You can even  submit a post by email, or via a mobile phone, by sending your thoughts and ideas to [email protected].
• You don’t need to have a Tumblr account to submit a post, but please include your city and country and any descriptive tags at the bottom of your post so that your ideas can be tagged for others to find. You can also easily create a free Tumblr account if you like this easy-to-use, multimedia microblogging tool.
• You‘re always free to scan all posts, search on topics and tags, soak up some of Smarter Cities background and inspiration material in the about section, or find answers in our Help & FAQ section. 

If you want more information, send any suggestions, questions or problems to [email protected]

Smarter Cities Prediction Market

My colleagues at IBM have asked me to invite you to participate in a unique prediction market experiment called the “Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets”.  

Prediction Markets harness the collective intelligence of a community to gain predictive insight, and often even outperform the experts – as was the case in the 2008 US Presidential election.  They utilize stock market principles where participants get play money to “trade” ideas.

IBM’s Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets will allow you, along with other thought leaders, to further explore questions, ideas and opportunities that emerged and help determine which ideas may have the greatest chance for success. 

Participation is easy. Just visit the Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets http://smartercities.ibm.spigit.com Web site and register.  Once you’re registered, you can choose a market and begin making trades. The markets are open till September 13th, 2009 11:59 EDT.   Please feel free to share this invitation with other individuals that might be interested in participating – all submissions will remain confidential and only aggregated trading results will be shared across the community.

Complete details are on the Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets Web site.  Participation requires less than 5 minutes and every participant will receive a full set of results and insights at the beginning of October. 

Take advantage of this unique opportunity to take part in this experiment, share your insights, and see the collective opinions of your peers on the future of Smarter Cities.