Is the window closing on enterprise customer communities?
A surprisingly few number of people engage significantly with the companies they care about via social media, as little as 4% according to new research, despite the vast majority of businesses investing in or planning to invest in various forms of social media this year. Exactly why this is the case has various causes. These […]
2013 predictions for enterprise social media
What will 2013 hold when it comes to the way businesses employ social media to how they operate? Or perhaps more accurately, to the way they find themselves increasingly surrounded by all things social? As organizations prepare their strategic plans for 2013, it sometimes feels that we’ve been on this treadmill for a good while […]

The leading indicators of social business maturity in 2012
So, it’s about seven years after social media first began to be used for business purposes. It’s been a long journey for some and shorter, more intense journey for others. What have we learned so far? What is the state of the industry…

How social data is changing the way we do business
It’s a familiar litany now, that the openness and transparency of social media will unleash a wide range of compelling outcomes for our organizations, if we’ll only embrace it. While there is little doubt that social media is one of the great phenomenons of our age, there are certainly those that think the hype surrounding […]

Showing Up to Share: From Fear to Fun
During the 1990s, a recession gave rise to a series of popular belt-tightening management edicts that consultants vowed would bring our economy back from the brink by establishing predictable revenue streams and operational efficiencies. Management gurus such as Michael Hammer led the charge with his audacious howl writing in the Harvard Business Review, “Don’t automate! […]

Reengineering Is Very Much Like Sex
Sex Sells!
For reasons too complicated to explain, even to myself, I’ve been doing a lot of clearing out of the “underbrush” in my office over the last couple of weeks. Some of this was absolutely essential because the physical piles of papers that will never be read, the files of long gone clients, the insights […]

Reengineering Work: Obliterate AND automate
I have been invited to moderate a customer panel on next-gen BPO at the Cognizant Community event next week. The theme of the conference is The Future of Work”. When I look at the wide range of industries represented on the panel, the economic models behind today’s BPO, the technologies which are influencing every business […]

Your Customer Service Duty
There’s good news for any manager who has grown exasperated with trying to delight customers through “over the top” service. You may be working too hard and the benefits are not forthcoming. We’ll do anything to keep customers because they tend to buy more from us and the cost of replacing them if they leave […]

Analytics Is the Social CRM Secret Sauce
A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put new spin on Social CRM. While we’ve all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable. Last week Harvard Business Review released […]