IBM’s goal is to promote the vision of social business by embedding it into the digital activities and everyday thinking of employees. The challenge is to inspire already technically savvy and digitally motivated employees to become ‘digital citizens’, enthuse them about the value social media can add and motivate them to start exploring the online world.
With this objective in mind, IBM BeNeLux enlisted the aid of global marketing agency, Ketchum Pleon, to help them transition from not just doing social media, but to transform their daily business through social technologies. A pool of best technical minds and leading innovators – who believe in building a smarter planet – decided to move IBM and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration they call Social Business.
IBM BeNeLux’s Social Business is based on three leading principles that challenge existing conventions in communications and Social Media:
2012 is here and after over 20,000 meetings with companies held by Universum’s team throughout 2011, we’ve had interesting discussions about what to expect this year. The first impression is that our colleagues in Africa, Asia and US are feeling that the competition for talent is getting fiercer, while the European colleagues see a market where employer brands are getting more innovative and competitive. All in all, we see seven trends that might shape 2012: 
Cheryl Riina, independent consultant, discussed the five drivers to creating and maintaining brand loyalty. Riina stated that 80% of business comes from 20% of customers, as brand loyalists are committed “true believers.” Technology has revolutionized the way we do business. Resulting from the combination of a radically transformed marketplace, revolutionized communication, and the challenging economic environment, we now have a “more experienced, more demanding, harder-to-please, and tech savvier consumer.” Given the challenges, one might assume that brand loyalty is a phenomenon of the past, but customers want to be loyal because they save time and simplify their lives with loyalty. Brand loyalty creates many benefits for a company, including the following: 
