Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IMVF) recently published a powerful piece highlighting the advantage businesses gain by recruiting and retaining Veteran Employees. Some highlights from that piece:

1. Veterans are entrepreneurial.

2. Veterans assume high levels of trust.

3. Veterans are adept at skills transfer across contexts/tasks.

4. Veterans have (and leverage) advanced technical training.

5. Veterans are comfortable/adept in discontinuous environments.

6. Veterans exhibit high levels of resiliency.

7. Veterans exhibit advanced team-building skills.

8. Veterans exhibit strong organizational commitment.

9. Veterans have (and leverage) cross-cultural experiences.

10. Veterans have experience/skill in diverse work settings.

All of these combine to also make veterans very successful small business owners. With that in mind, AT&T has a fantastic program to help get to that next level.

AT&T’s Operation Hand Salute is a ground-breaking 12-month education and mentoring program for small service-disabled veteran businesses. Operation Hand Salute will provide cutting-edge training that includes …

1.  Executive education at a leading business school
2.  Ongoing mentorship from successful business CEOs and AT&T executives
3.  Opportunities to position for AT&T contracts
4.  Introductions to other global companies

Requirements for admission into the program:

1. An annual revenue of at least $3 million
2. Documentation that their business has been in operation for at least one year
3. Proof of DVBE certification through either the Association of Service Disabled Veterans, or the Department of Veterans Affairs’ VetBiz Registry

Our objective is simple: to mentor a select group of service-disabled CEOs to improve their business operations and enhance their ability to win corporate contracts.

Apply at http://ohs.attsupplierdiversityevents.com from March 8th through March 23rd.

We welcome your comments (below).  How do you see this program benefitting not only veterans but businesses?  This win-win ability has a lot to champion and we welcome your comments and thoughts.

I’m sure you can think of more but a recent one caught my attention. In the Nov 2011 issue of IEEE Computer, there is an article by David Alan Grier (the computer science professor, not the guy from ‘In Living Color’) titled “The Honest Give-and-Take” that discusses the scale and scope of information in our society.

What struck me about the article is the anecdote that he uses about his new car. In short, he did not want to fill out surveys and preferences at the car dealer, but he did want to stay in touch via email whenever he needed service. As he continued to bring his car in for service, the targeted emails to him got more specific and accurate. Essentially, every time he brought his car in, the dealer would download his trip computer’s information about everywhere he drove, how long the trips were, how often he drove, etc. Despite being a bit put off, it got me to thinking….

How can a small business use this type of information access to compete with the big companies?

As all devices get connected to the cloud there is more info about everyone that is available. This information has often been available to big companies with massive resources. It is now becoming available to everyone thanks to inexpensive computing combined with access to the cloud.

As a small business, you could use the information to better serve your customers by providing insights into their potential purchases. Alternatively, you could tell your customers that their privacy is important to you, while it is not to the larger companies that are tracking their every move. You could still use aggregated information to improve your overall business while preserving privacy.

What opportunities would you like to see offered, more information or more privacy? What are ways that a small business can use tracking technology to better serve customers without raising security concerns?  We welcome your comments.

I hope you have the opportunity to review Alexandre and Robert’s work, and apply it to your own business planning. From my lens, as a Social Business strategist, I see increased application of video for both internal and external tutorials and other Business-to-Business knowledge transfer activities.

This is but one area to consider, but a sizeable one as we move to an era where we share more information via social platforms than we have in the past. Read the full White Paper here: http://go-att.us/2g9t

The central effort is driven by the need to listen to the spoken word at rates other than “normal”, which TTS has honed down fairly well. It’s the varied rates needed by the special needs population that is being researched. One of the completed studies on Fast Synthesized Speech for Adults with Early-Onset Blindness is available here.

It’s important to note that the mobile user base also will benefit from these studies, and this TTS research effort augments our  Natural Language studies.

A rare opportunity exists to help improve TTS overall that you can participate in. I just did the study, myself, and it took less than the 25 minutes indicated. Some of the generated statements are quite funny, but the net result is research that will greatly improve the ability of computing devices to execute text to speech translation.

Of course, the entire time I was doing the study, I kept waiting for the shock.

If you’d like to participate in this quick and easy study, click here. You’d be doing a good thing.

However, some reviewers can tend to relish in being adversarial just for the sake of being adversarial. Fortunately for the reviewer who aspires to deliver good content, there are key warnings that a reviewer is taking an adversarial, counter-productive approach — often for ulterior purposes.

In this salient work, Graham Cormode cites common practices used to denigrate the work of a writer. This comprehensive White Paper can be very useful for the writer to know what to expect and “write around the obstacles.” It is also good for readers to know the tactics and weapons such adversarial reviewers tend to deploy.

In a field where we need competent, astute reviewers to detect obvious errors, this White Paper from Cormode helps readers and writers to steer clear of the “negative naysayers” who would do more harm than good.

Read the White Paper now.

AT&T’s Walter Willinger and the University of Oregon’s Mojtaba Torkjazi and Reza Rejaie submitted a work to the Workshop on Online Social Networks in August of 2009 that has merits for us today as we ponder the lifecycle and longevity of any OSN.

One of their conclusions is that there is a lifecycle for OSNs and the decline is fed by two pernicious factors:

1) As the popularity of a site grows, it attracts attackers and spammers. The existence and increase of these elements have a dampening effect on users of the service, causing them to slow usage and even abandon the platform.

2)  A new “fashion” emerges that can address any perceived disadvantages of the current system.  If a system changes too much, it can lose users because it is difficult to keep up with the changes.  However, if the system refuses to change, users can become bored and newer systems will attract existing users away by providing the features sought by a large enough segment of the users.  Constant Innovation is not only a good idea, but required to maintain a leadership position.  However, that constant innovation cannot irritate existing users and drive them away.  It is a delicate balance.

More information is available in this classic study which sheds light on the topic for us today and into the future.  You can access the complete White Paper here.

If you’re interested in discovering what is going on with the world of Social Web Search and Mining (SWSM) you should look into the SIGR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conferences and other events.  You’ll learn about what is happening now with social media and how enterprises world-wide are deploying resources to achieve significant results.

• WSDM 2012 (Seattle, USA) – February 8-12, 2012
• JCDL 2012 (Washington DC, USA) – June 10-14, 2012
• SIGIR 2012 (Portland, Oregon, USA) – August 12-16, 2012

Conferences held in Cooperation with SIGIR (SIGIR members eligible for lowest registration rates: Join now)

• ECIR 2012 (Barcelona, Spain) – April 1-5, 2012

See also the upcoming events page, and ACM’s online calendar.

By aggregating mass amounts of Tweets, organizations can now tap into what is really happening in the marketplace. The best part is you don’t have to wait months and months for detailed studies. Companies today can get the information they need very rapidly on trends thanks to some new, rather sophisticated, research and analysis.

The field of Social Web Search and Mining (SWSM) has come alive as companies realize they can tap into what is actually happening — not just what their “gut feeling” tells them. This year, the Social Web Search and Mining Workshop gave its Best Paper award to AT&T Labs’ Researcher Narendra Gupta for work done on a paper entitled, Extracting Descriptions of Problems with Product and Services from Twitter Data.

In this work, you’ll read about what they did to measure effectiveness using the F-measure (a statistical tool used in research to determine accuracy) with Twitter data. The research used automatic extraction of descriptions of problems from Twitter data to determine results.

What is most amazing is how they draw valid implications from Twitter given the nature of communication used such as emoticons (e.g. : -), :-0 and other symbols), a variety of abbreviations which are used (e.g. ROFL, IMHO, etc.) and other unique terms (hash tags, RT, @mentions, etc.). By categorizing, then compiling, and later analyzing a massive amount of data, trends can be spotted long before they are traditionally available with most old-school reporting tools.

This breakthrough study is worth reading if you are concerned about what customers think about your products and services. Find out what trends are emerging before others know. To find out more about this exciting new research, read this award-winning White Paper at Extracting Descriptions of Problems with Product and Services from Twitter Data.

Recently, he penned an entry titled “When Communities Make Sense”, take a look at an excerpt from that post.

“When do communities make sense?  We have talked about the business value of communities and social media but how do you know if your product, service, or solution can benefit from a dedicated community?  My small print is that you won’t know for sure until you try but if you want some sort of prediction theory, here goes.

First, you need to make sure you understand your own business model and have clear measurements of success.  If you don’t then how can you be sure that the community is making a difference or not?  Understanding why you exist helps you form the discussion and impact the community can have.  As far as metrics is concerned, you could measure the impact by the utilization of your product or service, you could measure the number of customers or the number of engaged SME’s (Subject Matter Experts).  By measuring the impact of the community, you can make adjustments in your overall product strategy.

The second thing you need is a community of users.  I might argue that you need at least a hundred members of the community that are interested in reading the conversations.  A hundred may be high, but remember most folks will be like helicopter parents dropping in when they see the need and staying on the sidelines the vast majority of the time.  The second group you need is 3-4 dedicated individuals willing to contribute to the community on a regular basis.  Can you get by with 1 or 2?  Yes, if they are willing to contribute on a daily basis.  Having 3-4 gives you more diversity in the opinions and lowers the heavy lifting required.

Finally, you need something to talk about.  Some products are very conducive to conversations while others not so much.  Some products offer a diverse use like Office 2010 where there are multiple products and utility under the Office umbrella.  This type of product would greatly benefit from a community geared toward sharing tips, best practices, and how-to advice.  A product like SharePoint where customization is a business value would be a good candidate for a community.  Areas where there is a lot of change (Mobile Devices), a high degree of impact (Money Matters), where broad communications is needed (Cloud Computing) or where you have an interesting experience (TEC) are great examples of where products or services could benefit from a solid community.”

Strategically, my unit sees our Enterprise Business Community as one of the keys to our social strategy. Many of our product sets are highly technical in nature, lending themselves to detailed and long-term discussions on their most effective use. The tips, best practices, and how-to components are where we, from a care lens, are emphasizing our efforts. Eventually, we expect to move into co-creation and crowdsourcing.

It’s a fairly large effort. With a product set as broad as this, there are a lot of internal SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) who need to be on board to support it. In our Business Community to date, we’ve seen the most interest in, and the most results from, our mobility and unified communications product suites. We expect others to follow soon.

Internally, we have a robust and active Social Business suite that leverages communities to share information and ideas across not only functional areas, but also interest groups. For example, I maintain a community for over 3,000 military veterans and supporters that are members of our Veteran Resource Group. It allows for many ideas to get developed across the wide span of countries and time zones our company covers. We find it to be a very effective way to organize, plan events and national efforts,  and still allow for local chapter leadership to be independent.

• Here’s an example of how executives network in a community in the Marietta, Georgia, area – http://ow.ly/5Auyw
• Here’s a brief post on what to consider when you’re building a busines community online – http://ow.ly/5AuAs
• Here’s a post from Todd Stephens, Ph.D. on why business communities are important: http://ow.ly/5AuDc

How are you using communities, both inside the firewall and out? Are we on target with ours? I’d love to hear from you.

First, there has been a consistent and significant pattern of growth in a number of gaming user demographics. Some key points:

72% of American Households play computer or video games

37 years-The average game player age

29% of gamers were over the age of 50

These figures look a lot like your workforce, don’t they?

When you couple these factors with training program evolution to include virtual/augmented reality and scenario-driven training it says a lot about the current and future workforce.   I see our current and future workforce, and that of our customers, ready to conduct business in a more virtual setting.  This will likely include tutorials and training via environments like SecondLife and Teleplace. Teleplace, in particular, is ready for the “enterprise prime time” in that it has been made to look and feel fairly “corporate”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Ywrxy1PlM

AT&T Labs, our research arm, has been using SecondLife for data visualization, and conducts many of their meetings in-world as it allows for a completely different thought model than you would find in a traditional teleconference.

Culturally, I don’t know we are there yet, but I expect in the near term (3-5 years), we will be.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. I know there are going to be some strong feelings on either side of this one. Leave a comment and add to the discussion!

There is plenty of evidence illustrating the impact the Social Media revolution has had on business, and many conclusions can be made from them. If you have not seen these yet, they are worth watching:

2010 Social Media Revolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng

2011 Social Media Revolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SuNx0UrnEo

Most Business Leaders understand, given the macro-view they take with most of their roles, that “Social” is not a fad, that it is a fundamental shift in the way people communicate, and that it needs to be incorporated into their business strategies. They also understand that the adoption of collaborative tools in the workplace can effectively and rapidly breakdown the “Cylinders of Excellence” that impede knowledge transfer. Adoption of Social and Digital concepts is not particularly difficult here, but as it’s more theory than practice at this level, it is not as great a challenge.

Likewise, many of the rank-and-file, especially when talking about younger Gen-Xers and Milennials, almost intuitively use Social tools for communication. If 90% of email is in fact spam, there are strong indicators that new Media tools are rapidly becoming a highly effective, if not dominating communication model in the younger demographic. These workers are ready to, if not already are, using Social Business and Collaborative tools both inside and out of the workplace.

Where (generally) we’re seeing resistance is in mid to upper middle management. There are a few main reasons for this-

1) Many people are frankly “set in their ways”. In many cases we’re talking about people who have been performing the same job the same way for a number of years, and are generally focused (justifiably) on day-to day operating metrics. New tools and techniques often appear to be faddish and time-wasters.

2) There is a generational component at play here as well-Many (if not most) of our mid/upper middle management workers fall into the Boomer generation, which in the workforce represents the least likely demographic to use Social tools.

3) Factor in that we are all “doing more with  less”, and integrating the “new, shiny toy” becomes less and less palatable.

Here is where the Change Sandwich comes in:

For the most part the leaders “get it”. That’s the top bun.

The junior end of the work force is using it and is an integral part of their lives. That’s the bottom bun.

The meat is in the middle

In order to effectively integrate social and collaborative tools in the enterprise, support for them must come from the operational leaders of day-to-day business. The team I work with spends the bulk of our time evangelizing and demonstrating how these tools and strategies to employ them can benefit the business.

One example would be converting text-heavy process guides into short, three to five minute video tutorials housed on our internal collaborative platform (to facilitate sharing).

Here is an example of what we are doing in the YouTube channel to deliver a series of “How To” videos on frequent customer questions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ya7ia5bMfM&feature=youtu.be

What are you doing to take a bite out of your change sandwich?