New Florence. New Renaissance.

Atos’ “zero e-mail” campaign

Atos isn’t the only business trying to increase productivity through social networking, but it’s the only big corporation that’s tried to more or less banish e-mail among co-workers. The $12 billion-a-year company says its internal e-mail volume has fallen 70 percent since 2011, to an average of six messages per person each day. Switching to social networking “has changed how we manage and collaborate,” says Mareine. Although there’s no evidence that Atos’s “Zero E-mail” campaign contributed to the 60 percent jump in the company’s operating margins over the past four years, executives say it’s dramatically improved efficiency. Atos is now pitching BlueKiwi to IT-services clients.

BusinessWeek

 

Slack off email

The app tackles this by creating what Butterfield called "lateral transparency" within the company. Slack works just like other messaging apps like iMessage or Skype, but its messages are public inside the company.

"Using Slack, you can have a look at what's going on across the organization. So if you work in the marketing team, you can see what the sales people are dealing with," Butterfield said.

Messages regarding compensation reviews or issues dealt by human resources can be sent privately. But Butterfield said the app is not a substitute for email.

"Slack is for internal communication. As the CEO, I do this stuff, I have to deal with investors and partners," Butterfield said. "I spend a lot of time on email actually."

CBS News

 

 

Facebook’s Data Trove

The new rules reflect Facebook’s shifting attitude toward third parties using its data, considered one of the world’s richest sources of information on human relationships. In 2007, with great fanfare, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg invited outsiders to access to Facebook’s “social graph,” the friend lists, interests and “likes” that knit Facebook users together.

Facebook said it reversed course after users raised concerns about their data being shared with outsiders without their knowledge.

The new rules don’t “make it harder for developers to build social experiences,” said a Facebook spokeswoman. The rules “simply require them to do so in a more privacy-protective way.”

Other social networks, including like LinkedIn Corp. and Twitter Inc., also have restricted access to their data in recent years. But Facebook’s changes have generated more controversy.

WSJ

Artificial Intelligence at Facebook

Yann LeCun, who now serves as the director of FAIR, comes from a storied tenure of artificial intelligence research. He began his work in Bell Labs (founded by telephone father Alexander Graham Bell, and known for its experiments across myriad fields in telecommunications and technology) as a researcher starting in 1988, then moving to become a department head at AT&T Labs until developing 2003, when he began to teach at New York University. The modern convolutional neural network is a culmination of work throughout LeCun’s career. Ever wonder how an ATM can read your check? That was LeCun, whose early work included a neural network simulator called “SN” and deployed in 1996.

“When someone like Mark (Zuckerberg) comes to you and says ‘Oh, okay, you pretty much have carte blanche. You can put together a world-class research lab and I expect you to build the best research lab in AI in the world.’ I’ll say,’Hmm, interesting challenge.’”

PopSci

Personalized email–personality driven

Launched two months ago by a Nashville-based startup of the same name, Crystal knows the email style and preferences of just about everyone in the English-speaking professional world. It knows that Ammirati prefers short, blunt language and that I like sarcasm. If you’ve ever written anything on the Internet, Crystal probably knows how you like to correspond too. By analyzing data from publicly available sources like social media and private peer reviews on its own site, Crystal categorizes professionals into 64 personality types and extrapolates their work and communication styles from there.

Fortune

Photo Credit

Oracle’s “consumer grade” HCM

Every enterprise vendor talks about making their UX more attractive, especially to Millennial workers.

At HCM World this week in Washington, DC I was pleased to see how Oracle has been leveraging social networks, personal health trackers and other consumer technologies to “digitally transform” the talent management life cycle – in the location, engagement, retention and education of talent.

In a keynote, Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Development for HCM and in breakouts with analysts, Gretchen Alarcon, in charge of HCM Strategy and Mark Bennett who focuses on Collaboration technologies at Oracle provided details.

They include  “work/life” apps  focused on reputation management – which provides a clearer picture of how a candidate or employee is viewed by peers and the communities he / she works across enhancing the “social” glimpses LinkedIn and other networks provide.

Another focuses on wellness and competition with peers, leveraging growing “quantified self” data that FitBit, Apple Watch and other personal technology is generating.

More are coming in the “work/life” category including one on “My career development” which allows employees to benchmark themselves against career paths and even their fit for roles in other parts of their enterprises.

Oracle Learning Cloud, highlighted at the event, sources content from both internal and external sources, including YouTube and Massive Open Online Courses (MooCs) and personalizes recommendations.

When I asked Gretchen the risk of leveraging technologies also available to competitors, she pointed out few could match the role of Oracle’s technology infrastructure. That includes its global network of cloud data centers and its  investments to support transcoding and bit-rate adaptive video streams which remove latency issues as users publish and consume whether they are on slow 3g cellular or speedier WiFi networks.

The “consumery” vibe for the event was introduced and constantly reinforced by the host, Oracle’s Cara Capretta. She goaded the audience to tweet and had a couple of artists capture the key themes on the “social listening wall” that she projected early and often throughout the event. 

Target’s “Guest Central”

When Cornell arrivedat Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis, he was installed in the newly redone CEO’s corner suite on the 26th floor. Almost immediately he insisted he be moved to a smaller office down the hall that is only steps away from the company’s global data nerve center.

That’s the company’s mission-control-style monitoring room, which it calls “guest central.” There a team of 10 staffers scrutinizes live feeds from social media sites such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter, along with television stations, on nine large TV screens high on the wall. They watch intently and use software to aggregate data to gauge by-the-second reactions to a product launch or news
announcement or to respond quickly to, say, a customer fulminating on Twitter.

The social command center existed before Cornell became CEO. But he has beefed up its capabilities, and he’s looking for creative ways to use the data. He drops in every morning and insists on two updates a day.

Analytics have long been a central part of Cornell’s approach. When he headed Sam’s Club, the $55-billion-a-year Wal-Mart division, from 2009 to 2012,
he improved the unit’s customer-insights system, according to Maggie Nation, a marketing executive at Sam’s under Cornell. The effort yielded such good results that Wal-Mart had all of its insights teams report directly to Cornell.

Fortune

Enterprise 2.0 Summit–London

My friend David  Terrar is hosting what is shaping up to be a star-studded event on social collaboration and digital technologies at the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences in London on November 26.  Confirmed speakers are Mara Tolja of Deutsche Bank Celine Schillinger of Sanofi Pasteur, Bonnie Cheuk of Euroclear and Luis Garza of CEMEX among others.

More details here.

He’s also planning an “unconference” on 27th.  If you are anywhere near London those days, this should be on your agenda. It’s Thanksgiving weekend and we are expecting visitors, otherwise I would fly there.  The Academy at the corner of St. James’ Park is a great setting.

Photo Credit

Social Bestseller

Years before other novelists joined Twitter and Facebook, Mr. Coelho was reaching out to fans on MySpace and, later, putting short videos on YouTube. He has accounts on Instagram,Tumblr, Vimeo, Google+ and Pinterest. He often posts during high-traffic intervals in the U.S. to reach the most readers. Since 2012, he has more than tripled the number of @paulocoelho followers on Twitter. He doesn't follow many people back—those he does include Jeremy Piven, Jessica Simpson and Deepak Chopra.

He speaks and writes in Portuguese, English and French and posts in Spanish through a translator. He also keeps up a presence on Russian and Chinese social media.

WSJ

A book’s social avatars

These days books have their own microsites, Amazon feedback loops, Twitter hashtags, LinkedIn groups, Facebook pages, even their own apps and related tracking metrics and social analytics.

In addition:

For The New Polymath, my fellow author friend Peter Fingar created an animato.

For The New Technology Elite, I had a Pinterest gallery

For The Digital Enterprise, Jon Reed and Fred Zimmerman used ‘anthropomorphism-friendly textbots’ at Fred’s startup PageKicker to create a tag cloud.

Love the creative ways books are celebrated these days and the social imprints they create.