2012 NAFE WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT - SOCIAL MEDIA STAR

IBM’s Sandy Carter has a mission to help women succeed by motivating them to deploy social media for business development and sales growth. “Women are naturals at social media, and now they need to take their firmly planted experience in social media and drive it to the next level,” Sandy states. “The top social business folks today are mostly women; but men are jumping on the bandwagon that women built, and women are at risk of losing that competitive differentiation.  Women need to use their natural talents for social marketing and communications and embed them in the fabric of their businesses. This is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity.”

When you read that quote, you’ll understand Sandy’s title: Social Business Evangelist. “I’m a born marketeer,” she confesses. “At IBM, they say I can sell snow to eskimos.” Transforming social media into social business helped her drive successful turnarounds for two IBM software brands, Tivoli and Websphere. “I used social to grow the top line,” she says. “Then IBM saw that this was a huge market,” and they tapped her to lead evangelism and sales and set the direction for the $200B market opportunity of social business.

It was an experience years before that set Sandy working for women’s success. “I went to a meeting at a major bank in Japan, and the customer talked only to my male manager. He’d ask a question and I’d answer, but he’d look at my manager and wait for him to repeat it. It was humiliating.” She loves what her manager did:  he excused himself for the bathroom, saying, ‘I’m not the expert here. I’ll let you and Sandy talk.’ I continued the meeting, and the guy eventually apologized.” She thought about this experience for a while, and back at her job in Austin, she inaugurated a diversity group to empower women. She followed that by starting another in Raleigh. Then eight years ago, she created the IBM Super Women’s Group, a networking and mentoring group for tech women that’s now global and 15,000 strong. She also boosts tech women outside IBM, helping found the Global Executive Network of Women in Technology International (WITI), and she sits on WITI’s advisory council.

Sandy has penned three books, including the 2011 best seller Get Bold, all while mothering her two girls, now 11 and 13. She was recently named one of the "Ten Most Powerful Women in Tech" by CNN Money. Spend ten minutes with this brilliant woman and you pick up on how she eats and breathes social media. She stresses over and over—until you surrender—that “social business impacts companies’ bottom lines and can take them to the next competitive level, and right now, social is women’s competitive advantage. If women don’t bring it into their businesses, men will.”