Exploring social business strategy

I’ve been coming across a lot of different lists of social media predictions for the coming year. One of the things that jumps off the screen is how remarkably similar they are, with messages like “focus on people, not consumers”, “it’s all about conversations”, convergence / cross-platform offerings, etc. I initially nodded along with most [...]

[Read more →]

As the equity markets have imploded over the last year, a lot of explanations for what’s happened have been popping up. Most of these involve pointing fingers at a variety of problems tied to debt – sub-prime and otherwise. However, I think there is a far more fundamental problem that has long existed that not [...]

[Read more →]

So there’s a couple of things I’ve noticed about “broadcast media” lately. First off, hardly anyone is talking about it, particularly in relation to the far-more-sexy “social media” topic. While it’s a bit of an unfair test (given that Twitter is a social media platform itself), I find it notable that a Twitter search for [...]

[Read more →]

So… I wasn’t expecting to see this today. For those of you unfamiliar with Canada, Canadian Tire is basically a hardware store turned department store, and their current tag line is “For days like today.” Apparently, “days like today” no longer include days where someone might want to buy something from them online. This image [...]

[Read more →]

Consider the following two sentences:
You are an excellent salesperson on Twitter.
You are a very persuasive person on Twitter.
Now I haven’t done a scientific study on this by any means, but I have been exploring a number of stories about Twitter users lately, and I have generated a significant amount of discussion around my previous two [...]

[Read more →]

Yesterday’s post proved a few important things to me. One, when someone like Chris Brogan re-tweets you it can drive a lot of thoughtful activity on your site. Two, because of #1, if you think that a conversation might get started don’t put up the post / tweet about it and then head off for [...]

[Read more →]

So I’ve been thinking about how Gladwell’s Tipping point – and particularly the 80/20 rule, where the 20% doing most of the work are broken out into connectors, mavens, and salesmen – might apply to Twitter. I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I was trying to construct an argument that beyond a [...]

[Read more →]

Similar to the Intel logo thing, there’s another graphic I like to use to get people thinking about what prosumerism really means – a bit of a play on one of the more famous political speeches of all time:

Think about how dramatic of a mind-shift that could be for many companies – instead of solely [...]

[Read more →]

As my “about me” section covers, I’ve got a few side projects – and chTONGUEeek is one of my favorites. This post is for the economics types – and like the Jewish Dentist in Seinfeld, my economics training gives me the leeway to take these jabs. Anyone else might be accused of being an anti-economidite [...]

[Read more →]

The ideas around prosumerism – particularly around customer co-creation – appear to be becoming ever more popular with companies, even if the term itself isn’t widely used. In addition to the Dilbert example I like to open presentations with (and part II of that series is coming soon), there’s another graphic I like to use [...]

[Read more →]