Category: Drew’s Articles

7 Reasons why Social Business is Smart Business

Posted on by Drew Neisser

This post first ran on FastCompany.com and is my post popular story to-date.  It covers how IBM is moving itself and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration, insight sharing and lead generation.

It takes extraordinary chutzpah to promote a vision before it can be fully realized by your audience let alone your company. IBM did just that in 1997 when it introduced the notion of @e-business. Fourteen years later it is doing it again with a concept they call @socialbusiness. Given their prescience about e-business, a concept that radically transformed how companies buy/sell their products, it is hard to dismiss their latest idée fixe: Social Business.

That said, getting your arms around this grandiose idea is not easy. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, spent the better part of an hour with me explaining the ins and outs while providing specific examples of how IBM is testing various social business approaches both internally and externally. In the end, I came away with these seven reasons why just about every company should be thinking about becoming a social business.

1. Social media will be dwarfed by social business
While social media has helped many companies become more customer-centric, it is treated primarily as a modestly effective marketing tool. McCarty explained, “Social media is about media and people, which is one dimension of the overall world of business. With social business you start to look at the way people are interacting in digital experiences and apply the insights derived to a wide variety of different business processes.”

2. People do business with people not companies
One of the notions behind becoming a Social Business is that your employees should be front and center in your digital activities. Instructed McCarty, “Since IBM no longer sells consumer products, the brand experience for IBM is an experience with an IBMer,” an experience that is increasingly happening online. To support this idea, IBM recently started adding IBMer “experts” to various web pages— an action that in A/B testing dramatically improved page performance and revealed increased confidence and trust in IBM in focus groups.

3. Your employees need to be digital citizens too
Becoming a Social Business means recognizing the need for your employees to become “digital citizens” and providing the training for them to manage their digital reputations. Accordingly, IBM not only trains its experts extensively, it is now building out “personal dashboards” to help them see the impact of their various interactions. “Good conversation creates good outcomes and that brings value to the organization and to the individual,” McCarty concluded.

4. You don’t need to eat the whole social business elephant in one bite
When asked, “How do you eat an elephant?” the sage pygmy replied, “One bite at a time.” And so it is with social business initiatives. IBM itself tried a number of different approaches internally: First by using a Wiki to draft its social computing guidelines and more recently by offering a “Social Computing Demystified” course to help more IBMers become digital citizens. These smaller building blocks helped pave the way for bigger initiatives like the expertise locator that now taps into nearly 3,000 IBMers from around the world.

5. A social business can be a good business too
The same tools and processes that go into creating a social business can also be put to use for social good. To test this notion and in honor of its 100th anniversary, IBM asked every employee “to take a full day and dedicate it to skills-based service.” Calling it the Centennial Celebration of Service, thousands of IBMers shared their expertise and then their experiences on IBM100.com. “Now you have in this social business program the permissioning and guidance matched with content so IBMers can get started and experiment [with social business],” beamed McCarty.

6. Enough already with the useless email trains
Most companies rely on email as the primary means to share information among employees despite the havoc it often creates. “Email is a very limited tool and does a lot of things to silo work efforts,” McCarty noted. Calling it “completely antisocial,” McCarty believes that a social business needs to employ more collaborative digital work tools (well beyond email) that are asynchronous, enabling a geographically disperse team to do great work together.

7. It’s okay to fail as long as you do it quickly
Since not every social business initiative will take hold, it is important to try lots of approaches and move on when one doesn’t work. IBM describes this as “agile development.” “You can’t spend 10 months planning it and then launching it—the idea is to learn quickly and if we need to, fail quickly,” noted McCarty. As case in point, McCarty claims the first iteration of their expertise locator went from concept to a test on IBM.com in four weeks with new iterations following in monthly succession sprints as short as two weeks. McCarty firmly believes this particular social business program, although still in its infancy, has infinite possibilities.

Final note
McCarty is a passionate evangelist who believes “social digital activity is moving from the periphery to the center of business.” To understand this and how social business is “increasing the surface area of an organization,” be sure to see my extensive interviews with McCarty on this blog.

Developing a Social Business Program

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I realize this was a long interview and you may be ready for me to move on BUT this last part contains some really smart advice for other companies looking to develop their own Social Business programs.  Also, this interview produced my latest post on FastCompany.com entitled Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business.

Drew: What advice would you give to a B2B company interested in pursing a similar program?  What three things would you say to them?

Ethan: Probably, don’t use the word, “expert.” There are some cultures that are completely allergic to using that word in reference to themselves.

Drew: Makes sense. How did you get this thing up and running?

Ethan: One of the things we’ve done that’s been really helpful is we made sure that we had people from all around the world working on the project. I’m a member of a team we call the Expertise and Eminence Round Table.  It started with six of us just meeting on Friday morning and talking about the work we were doing.  The group represents some people from our hardware group, some from software and others from Services and the CIO office.  They heard about the work that my team and I were doing and they wanted to be apart of the project. We realized we were all managing lists of experts, so we got our lists together. We started with a base population in the Expertise Locator System that’s very diverse so we can learn a lot from that. From there we hit the ground running.

Drew: What else would you advise?

Ethan: We are trying to apply what’s called “agile development” to this system so we put out a new version or update it just about every two weeks. The idea is we try to learn quickly, and if we need to fail quickly, we’re failing quickly.  When stuff doesn’t work, two weeks later we’re changing it.  With Digital systems like the Expertise Locator,  you can’t spend 10 months planning it and then launch it.  From the point when we wanted to get this on ibm.com to the point we had it on ibm.com was four weeks.  It wasn’t a service at that point; it was this manually coded thing. In the next version we had the database set up, and in the next version we had the API described.

It was very iterative; my advice – you really want to get something up that you can start to have people experience quickly.  It’s complicated because people expect [that because] it’s from IBM, surely it’s done when it’s out the door. It would be quite different if this were a product that we’re putting into market, but this is a cultural program, a communications and marketing program.  In that way we have a bit more flexibility to iterate and learn as we go— that would be a very key lesson for anybody who’s going to try to get into this.  You’re talking about working with lots of people, and you can’t predict how people behave. It would be tremendous hubris to say that you could predict how people are going to behave.

Drew: Is there a component of this where the accessibility of these experts is giving away the very expertise that you sell?

Ethan: The interaction that experts have or that people have with IBMers right now through this is pretty light.  It’s not like a free six-month consulting engagement with a team of our principle consultants. I think it’s more of a means to get to know us, and we can help you build your business through that.

Drew:  What’s in it for the expert?  I mean they’ve got their own job.

Ethan: That’s a great question. First of all, there are some IBMers for whom interaction with the public, clients in particular, or prospective employees or whomever, is a facet of their job.  If you’re going to be one of our most eminent technologists, you’d be called a distinguished engineer or maybe you’d be a member of our academy of technology or a master inventor. These people already have it in their job description to interact with clients and prospects, and they’re supposed to be mentoring people. There are all kinds of things that they’re already supposed to be doing and quite directly participating as someone in our Expertise Locator System or participating in social business at IBM would allow them to do that more effectively.  Soon, they will actually be able to track it. You could say, “Look, I showed up on web pages 350,000 times.”

Secondly, these days employees are sort of global capitalists in a way. You’re a citizen of a digitally interconnected globe at this point, and your reputation is everything.  If you cannot manage your reputation— your digital professional reputation— you’re in real trouble. One of the things that we’re building out in social business at IBM is a personal dashboard that starts to show things like how many times you were surfaced and how many times people connect with you. We’re helping to establish each IBMers digital reputation with these tool, and a digital reputation is becoming vital in today’s business world.

A Deeper Look at Social Business

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In this part of the interview, Ethan McCarty IBM’s Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy, goes into more specifics about their social business initiatives. Of particular interest to me is the Expertise Locator, a nascent Marketing as Service program that connects prospects/customers with experts IBMers.

Drew: Walk me through your various social business initiatives at IBM.

Ethan: IBM’s social business initiatives run deep – from the products and services we sell to clients to our own use of the technology and implementation of social business processes throughout the organization. IBM Connections is our social software platform for businesses designed for workers to network both inside and outside of the firewall. It’s basically the backbone for an organization to transform into a social business. It provides all the necessary social tools – wikis, blogs, communities, instant messaging, etc. – and social analytics features to allow employees to really expand their professional network, to find and contribute content, to identify expertise within their organization and ultimately drive the bottom line for the organization. We’re using this technology at IBM and reaping huge benefits.

Beyond drinking our own champagne, a huge priority for IBM, in order to really become a social business, has been education. We offer a huge catalogue of educational modules all around how to get involved in social computing. Back in 2007, we used a Wiki and about 250 IBMers wrote our Social Computing Guidelines collaboratively. We offer modules around why IBMers need social computing, we provide examples of how IBMers have used social digital experiences to improve customer interaction, sales, business value, various business process – these examples are impactful. We offer a Social Computing Demystified course and then we have a course about IBM’s digital strategy in general. This is all available to every IBMer on an internal site, Social Business @ IBM. It’s a one stop educational resource for the IBMer who wants to establish their digital reputation and two-fold, help to enhance IBM’s brand.

Drew: How have IBMers embraced these initiatives?

Ethan: IBMers are ready to go out there and be the brand. A great example of this is our Centennial Celebration of Service. This year is IBM’s 100th anniversary, and it’s a big deal. In honor of the accomplishment, we asked every IBMer [to] take a full day and dedicate it to skills-based service. This event was about IBMers going out and teaching the thing they’re great at or going to a non-profit and helping them to optimize their IT systems or doing consulting in the industry that they’re expert in. You can go to look at our IBM 100 website and you’ll see some of the visualization’s from the day of service. IBMers uploaded almost 2,000 photos of themselves doing these celebrations of service, they tweeted using the hashtag we created to trend on twitter. The event was all about giving back and celebrating our organization’s expertise and talent, but being the social business that we are, it incorporated so many digital and social experiences as well.

Drew: Tell me about the Expertise Locator.

Ethan: A new social business initiative we’re rolling out is the Expertise Locator, which is also situated in the context of that training material we talked about earlier. IBM no longer sells consumer products; the brand experience for IBM is an experience with an IBMer. If your brand is experienced through its people— not through the products— then you’d want to make sure that your very best people are well equipped to interact with the important audiences and constituencies. That’s what the Expertise Locator is about. It’s incredibly nascent; we’ve just been working on this for a year and a half, but we already have several thousand IBMers who have enrolled internally and we’re starting to help those IBMers prepare for being surfaced in digital experiences all over the place— not just on our Intranet.

The next phase of this project is to really describe our experts and do the hard work of figuring out what the policies will be for accessing them – how will we give them enough controls that it’s not invasive to them or they don’t get overwhelmed or how do we make sure the right experts show up on which page so they’re connected with the right people. There are kinks to work out, but we’re really excited about the impact its going to have on the IBM brand experience.

Drew: Is there a risk here of over-promising this one-to-one interaction between this expert and the visitor?

Ethan: I think there is that risk. But, there are a few things that are helping to mitigate that. One is we’re not promising a one-to-one interaction. There are interaction modes on IBM.com where that it is promised, but the Expertise Locator is not that kind of immediate interaction, its offering the opportunity to connect with these IBMers over LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, by phone, etc. The interaction with voices from IBM can be extremely multi-modal and very satisfying. I think we can actually deliver on that, particularly because a lot of the social systems that are emergent that we’re taking advantage of. We could get to that point where, depending on who you are, we would match you with, and what you’re trying to accomplish, we could match you with the right person who has the right modality of interaction.

There are lots of risks and we’re going to have to figure out how to address them and we’re trying to apply some of our best thinkers to that. We also think there’s a big risk to circling the wagons and ignoring this new mode of doing business. Becoming a truly holistic social business is not without its risks, but ultimately taking these risks is what sets you apart from the pack.

Drew: How do you measure the value of a program like this?

Ethan: There’s the operational measures like, Are we getting people to enroll? Are they going through the training? The company does some internal research periodically about a lot of different issues, but one of them is awareness of our guidelines. I would like to see that one of the results of this would be more IBMers really feel like they’re familiar with the social computing guidelines and feel empowered by that. We ask those kinds of questions internally, so those are sort of operational metrics.

When we were first testing how we would show experts on external web pages, we did an AB test. We found that the page performed better when we put experts on it. It’s not that surprising; everybody who’s been doing web stuff for a while knows that your confidence and trust in the page is going to go up when you see real humans on it. We did focus group analysis and asked for feedback. [The participants] looked at the expert: It showed whatever the expert’s latest blog entry or tweet was, so they got the sense that there’s another person there. Their confidence in the page went up; their trust in IBM went up. Overall they were feeling better about being there.

Part 3 of this interview will be posted tomorrow.


A Deeper Look at Social Business Part I

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Here is the first part of my interview with Ethan McCarty IBM’s Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy.  Its hard not to be impressed with IBM’s approach to social, elevating the discussion from a “nice to have” media component to a “must have” means of doing business.

 

Drew: Most businesses are trying to get their mind’s wrapped around social media, and you folks are now talking about social business. What’s the difference between those two terms?

Ethan: I think there’s a variety of interpretations for these terms : social media and social business. Social media is typically about mediated experiences with content, and sometimes it’s about dis-inter-mediating the experience. Social media is about media and people, which is one dimension of the overall world of business. With social business you start to look at the way people are interacting in digital experiences and how you can apply the insights derived from all the data and apply them to business processes that may not necessarily be about dissemination of information.

Drew: Tell me about the various dimensions of Social Business, and how companies can deploy it.

Ethan: Social business is about looking at  business processes differently;  from how you are listening to your customers, to how you are engaging with a wide-variety of constituencies. It could be your employees, or it could be potential investors; it could be current investors; it could be prospects for your business.

One of the main dimensions of social business is about managing relationships through these new business processes. Social media is more about disseminating information in new ways, using people as the medium rather than broadcast systems as the medium.  In social business you might be managing community relationships or relationships with individuals; you might be identifying and activating experts or rewarding and recognizing certain kinds of behaviors. And then of course another really important dimension of social business is collaboration. I think that is beyond the thought of social media because it’s not always about creating an information document.  It could be things like collaborative editing, but it could also be file sharing or expertise location.

There are things in the realm of social business that are more about working to improve the efficiency of teams as opposed to just getting a message out there, which I think a lot of the initial social media really were about. Social business is sort of a super-set of social media. Social media is one component of social business.

Drew: Is social business a mind set or a skill set? Or is it a product?

Ethan: All of the above. There are certainly products that enhance an organization’s ability to become a social business. For example, IBM offers a platform of products that enable social business – wikis, blogs, communities, instant messaging, etc. Beyond these products, and really in order to implement and adopt them successfully, social business has to be move than just a mindset, it has to be an organization’s cultural priority. Leaders have to be committed to making significant business process changes in order to actually make work getting done easier and more efficient. We have at IBM a social business management council that  includes some very high-ranking IBM executives, IBMers in the CIO office, in HR, etc., [and] we perform risk analyses and opportunities analyses to help us establish new modes of work. One of the efforts that I’m leading with an IBM HR leader is to look at how we’re going to formalize these new modes of work into our skills at IBM. Social business at IBM is a priority, we’re constantly fine tuning our processes to better serve our customers, partners and ourselves.

Social business is a pretty broad thing, and it includes skills that aren’t necessarily obvious to every employee.  Also there’s a broad area of policy development that we, as an industry, need to do. If you think about how many relationships between an enterprise’s employee base and those with whom they are supposed to be working have been mediated and controlled by processes that are not necessarily enabled by the most contemporary social business approaches, you’ll see the world has a lot of work to do in this area. That is, to me, very promising.

Drew: How is Social Business being integrated into IBM’s business model?

Ethan: There are a couple major concepts that we’re currently working on. One is acknowledging that social, digital activity is moving from the periphery to the center of business. And to me, that’s a big part of what social business is. It’s the transition of all the interesting and fun social activity that’s taken place in the commercial domain is becoming increasingly applicable to enterprises, and how enterprises get work done; how enterprises manage relationships with their clients; how employees work together. That’s a significant change in business.  Social, digital activity and experiences are no longer a frivolous, nebbishy thing for teenagers and college students. Enterprises are realizing the power of these tools to transform there business.

IBM’s a great example of this social business transformation; a lot of our work is done using digital, collaborative means. Consider this, I’ve got eight people on my core team, and, not one of us lives in the same city, and many of us are in different time zones.  I work with IBMers in Australia and California and Michigan and all around the Tri-State area, and we’re doing all kinds of great work together, every day. It’s asynchronous; it’s collaborative. The way we work together is digital and a lot of it this work and collaboration is not happening over email.  Email is a very limited tool, and in some ways completely antisocial.  It does a lot of things to silo the work efforts. Instead of email, we’re using social tools – file sharing, video conferencing, wikis, communities, instant messaging, etc – to get our jobs done.

FYI, you can follow Ethan on Twitter @ethanmcc.

8-Step Guide to Growing a Fruitful B2B Social Media Program

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The hand-painted sign said, “Try me.”  Just a bit of tomato for the taking at my local farmer’s market. So try it I did. Shazam! In my mouth I savored a breathtaking morsel of sun-ripened yumminess.  A tasty revelation reminding me that the bland blobs we buy in supermarkets have been bred for everything but eating.

Some time ago mass-market tomato farmers exchanged flavor for firmness, zest for bug resistance and vine ripening for carbon dioxide coloration. In their eagerness to sell, they lost their way— a cautionary tale for B2B marketers hoping to exploit social media on a grand scale. With this in mind and at the risk of providing metaphoric manure, I offer this tomato lover’s 8-step guide to growing a fruitful B2B social media program.

1. Plant the right seeds
Mass-market farmers lost their way when they put their own needs ahead of their customers.  B2B marketers who approach social media as a sales channel first will see their efforts die on the vine. Explains Trish Nettleship, Social Media Lead at AT&T Business Marketing, “The key is never starting with the platform.  Start with the consumer in mind and that will lead you to the right platform with the right purpose at the right time.”

2. Choose the proper fields
Soil matters; choose poorly and your seeds won’t take.  B2B marketers now have a myriad of social media options from the heavily harvested LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter to the lesser-plowed Slideshare, Quora, and StumbleUpon.  CMO.com just updated their helpful Social Landscape, which grades the top social platforms by their ability to engage, generate exposure, drive site traffic and enhance SEO.

3. Fertilize early and often
For B2B marketers, content is the fertilizer that insures growth.  Chip Rodgers, who heads up operations of the 2.5-million-member SAP Community Network, notes that, “it’s a virtuous cycle–content brings community which in turn, brings better and fresher content.”  Rodgers encourages marketers to “feed the community your best [content] by leveraging the experts you already have.”

4. Monitor your crop carefully
Like farming, social media requires constant attention. There are few shortcuts because as Persia Tatar, Founder of the Social Media Society explains, “The core of social media is about relationships.”  Tatar, who built a loyal following on Twitter in just 12 months, adds, “I monitor my Tweet stream and reward individuals that have engaged as brand advocates with special invitations and exclusive content.”

5. Seek organic growth
Gassing tomatoes may turn them red and hasten their trip to market but it leaves them tasteless. B2B marketers who try similar shortcuts in social media will also come up short. Realizing that their subject matter experts weren’t as experienced in social media, AT&T took the time to creating the Networking Leaders Academy.  “We now have an active corps of expert ambassadors who create social proof and digital trust in AT&T,” Nettleship reports.

6. Weed quickly
Even the best-laid seeds can fail despite careful planning.  IBM, which recently launched an “expertise locator” to make highly knowledgeable IBMers accessible to prospects and customers, prescribes an “agile development” process for social programs.  Explains Ethan McCarty, senior manager, Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, “The idea is that we try to learn quickly–when stuff doesn’t work, two weeks later we’re changing it.”

7. Harvest when ripe
Marketers who to try to sell too quickly via social will find themselves in an unappetizing situation.  On the other hand, building trust via social media and the harvest can be bountiful.  After seven years of nurturing, SAP’s Community Network is now driving traffic to webinars and direct product sales.  We’ve really cut back with list buying and traditional marketing costs,” Rodgers says.

8. Refine and renew
Social media programs, like fields, wear out and need to be refined or replaced.  Having milked this metaphor for all its worth, I turn the final spotlight back on Rodgers, who will be making his case at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philadelphia September 28-29 along with AT&T’s Nettleship.   Concludes the zesty Rodgers, “[Members are] only drawn to come back because they know your content is always fresh, relevant and compelling.” (Note: this article first appeared on MediaPost.com.)

What Your User Community Should Look Like

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In the hype that is social media marketing, it is often hard to distinguish between the braggadocio and the brilliant. Communities are launched with great fanfare only to slink away quietly into the burial ground of false promise. So to stumble across a vibrant community— one that predates Facebook and supports a B2B brand— is not just surprising, it is downright awe-inspiring.

Thanks to the support of an enlightened board member in 2003, the SAP Community Network (SCN) was able to overcome internal naysayers, and gradually grow into a 2.5 million-member social business juggernaut. Now heading community operations, Chip Rodgers, who I interviewed in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit, the SCN sets a high standard, revealing these 9 ways to know your community is truly awesome.

1. Adding members is no longer a key performance indicator
Because communities are still considered a luxury by some executives and a risk by many (rightly or wrongly) there is tremendous pressure in the early days to achieve scale. The SAP Community Network crossed this threshold in the last 24 months. Reports Rodgers, “Around the time we got close to 2 million, we stopped emphasizing the growth of the community.”

2. Community engagement is a daily activity
“If you build it, they will come,” is pure fiction when it comes to communities, which is why most wither away. Remarkably, the SCN gets about 1.5 million unique visitors per month and 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day. “Our activity numbers are really strong,” Rodgers explains. “I think that’s something we pride ourselves on as there are other communities that may have more members but feel like ghost towns; we have vibrancy.”

3. The community jumps in to defend the brand
It is inevitable that a brand will come under criticism for one thing or another once it opens up a community. Offers Rodgers, “We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky.” But rather than rushing out a brand response, “what ends up happening is a lot of community members [jump in saying] ‘This is way over the line,’ or ‘Nah that’s not really true.’’”

4. You can drive your own circulation
Building and maintaining a healthy community on the scale of the SCN is expensive so there is unavoidable pressure to demonstrate value to management. Rodgers notes, “One of our KPI’s is driving activity to webinars and that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars traceable back to activity in the community.” In effect, the community acts like a media channel, supporting other marketing efforts and ultimately, top-line sales.

5. The community willingly embraces a direct sales channel
Purists worry that connecting a community with any kind of sales channel will dilute the value of the community. While there is a risk of being too “salesy,” an inevitable by-product of a healthy community are product discussions. Seeing these, SAP set up an online store called SAP EcoHub that started within the community and is now an increasing channel that drives real leads and revenue.

6. The community impacts product development
Customer-generated ideas have long been discussed as the holy grail of community activation, but getting there can be perilous. “The last thing we wanted to do was have a bunch of people contribute ideas and then have nobody listen or act on them,” Rodgers says. Working closely with the “proactive” product teams on selective topics, he has “gotten great feedback and contributions from the community that are already incorporated in the latest solutions.”

7. The marketing group wants in
Successful communities like the SCN are often started outside of marketing departments as a form of post-sale customer service. This orientation gives the community a head start since the emphasis is on creating content of genuine value and not pure product messaging. But with the heightened interest in having robust social media programs, it is not surprising that the SAP marketing department grabbed the reins of the SCN six months ago.

8. The community drives cultural change within marketing
Rodgers, who has run the SCN for five years, might have been apprehensive when marketing subsumed his group earlier this year, but you wouldn’t know it now. “Last year, our CMO said, ‘Guys we need to learn from [the SCN] and we need to have conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and an offer.’”

9. The content developed on the community profoundly improves SEO
With a staff of 12 dedicated to developing formal content like white papers, articles and solutions briefs, Rodgers is able to keep up with his ravenous community, feeding it fresh content on a daily basis. And by optimizing this content for search, starting about 2 years ago, the SCN was able to more than double monthly site traffic. “I mean it was dramatic; it was unbelievable,” Rodgers observes with a sense of pride and awe.

Final note: It’s not often you hear about a huge B2B company operating with a B2C mentality for customer engagement. For my complete interview with Chip Rodgers, see my previous post here.  You can visit the SAP Community Network at and hear Rodgers yourself at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philly on October 12th.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.