
Social Media Predictions for 2014
Even though spending on social media marketing is at an all-time high and continues to grow, there’s a good reason that the overall portion of the marketing budget dedicated to social channels remains comparatively small. Frankly, this is a bit surprising. It’s been nearly 10 years after social media arrived on the scene and today social media […]

Today’s Community Manager Skills: Savvy in Engagement, Social Data, and Business
Community Managers: The Hub of Social Business One of the questions I’m asked the most often about social business is about its key success factors. Specifically, what fundamentally makes a given enterprise social media effort likely to be successful? While the answers to this haven’t changed that much over the last couple of years, I’ve […]

Proactively Manage Your Social Assets To Outperform
Repeatedly over the last few months I’ve encountered clients struggling with an important new problem: A vast and growing wealth of social assets. While we often talk about cultivating corporate social capital — in other words making sure we cultivate connections in social networks and over social media to the people and companies that matter […]

Social Business By Design: A Year of Lessons Learned
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a whole year since the management strategy book which Peter Kim and I wrote — Social Business By Design — hit the shelves in bookstores and online. At the time, we felt there was a distinct need in the marketplace for a clear-eyed assessment of what had been […]

Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2013 – Part 1
It was certainly an exciting year in social media for brands in 2012, with many intriguing industry developments. Given that the pace of innovation in social will only increase this year, what will 2013 hold for brand marketers as they seek to capitalize on today’s trends? From my discussions, I find that CMOs in particular […]

Practical Measurement Methods for Social Media Marketing
There’s a relatively new thing you can now say for sure about social media. Despite the sheer volume and variety of online conversation today, it can now be readily measured and analyzed in scale. With the advent of powerful new methods and tools for dissecting and making sense of the millions of conversations taking place […]

Six Strategies to Optimize Your Social Business Efforts
Once an organization starts listening to and begins engaging in the social world in a meaningful way, then the many benefits of becoming a social business can be fully be explored. And exploration is the right word for it, because the amount of unknowns about how to best go about taking advantage of our profound, […]

Transforming Noise into Signal: Isolating Social Business Results
One of the biggest obstacles I see that businesses engaging in social media have today is clearly understanding the effect their efforts — particularly in externally facing processes such as marketing — are actually having. There are a number of reasons for this and together they conspire to create an environment that leads to uncertainty […]

The Operations of a Social Business
Earlier this year I explored the structural aspects of social business so we could collectively get a sense of what our organizations need to look like in order to engage effectively in social media at scale. Overall, I was pleased that the feedback on this architectural view of social business was quite positive across the

Facebook as a Public Company: The Impact To Business
By this time next week, Facebook should have had its successful debut as a public company. With this highly anticipated event concluded, we’ll get a sense of the market’s true estimate of what the company is worth in terms of its long term prospects to create genuine value for investors. By all accounts, the IPO […]