Exploring social business strategy

TechCrunch had an interesting article yesterday on Topix. The central message was that it had quietly become the “local watering hole” for small towns, as evidenced by the total comments on the site (now in the 100 M range).  It then went on to make the claim that the reason people like myself haven’t been [...]

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Many companies have been pursuing various ways to connect their brands with charitable causes – a subset of what we call “brand as movement.” In some cases, doing so seems easy – say, a bookstore supporting literacy programs. But for many organizations, such obvious connection points do not exist, and it’s a big challenge to [...]

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I spend most of my working life researching how collaborative technologies – particularly social media – are impacting business strategy. My academic background is in economics. So when The Economist does a special report on something like social networking, it always gets my attention. And as with most articles in the publication, I always find [...]

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My job as executive editor at nGenera Insight involves doing a lot of research about new business models and start-ups tied to the Web 2.0. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing a high level overview of some of the work I’ve been doing recently. Today I’m going to start by talking [...]

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A couple of months ago, buried deep within a post about the Memphis Grizzlies’ prosumer experiment, I made reference to how the experience of “Snakes on a Plane” using an innovative social media marketing experiment, and then failing to put butts in the seats, was being misread. In short, people seemed to jump to the [...]

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Back in March I wrote about a potential framework for how different brands use Twitter. It’s a simple 2 x 2 matrix. On the X-axis I separate out brand and personality centric accounts – basically whether it’s a “real” human or a company / logo. On the Y-axis I separate out broadcast and conversation centric [...]

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Yesterday I talked about how broadcasting – contrary to popular belief – can be a very effective strategy on Twitter. I gave two examples – Amazonmp3 and Whole Recipes – and decided I should provide a few more over the coming weeks. So today I thought I’d highlight another in woot.com, which is a pretty [...]

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I’ve found there to be some common threads across many (I believe the majority) of the discussions about the “right way” to use social media. You might recognize some of them – it’s about conversations, not broadcasts; it’s about engaging with people, not trying to sell to them; you need to humanize the brand – [...]

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I’m working on a new presentation about Twitter that’s going to be delivered in a couple of weeks. The first few slides are about what I’m calling the phases of Twitter’s evolution (based on my experience with it) – the types of discussion that seemed most relevant to understanding the platform at various junctures, and [...]

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As revealed on my wikinomics post that went up this morning, I’m fascinated by the different ways that the NBA, it’s teams, and it’s players are engaging with social media. My hometown team is the Toronto Raptors, and by extension I tend to follow what Chris Bosh – NBA superstar / web 2.0 fanatic – [...]

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