Exploring social business strategy

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’m preparing to take part in a Branding 2.0 panel on Wednesday, and for such events I like to try to come with a perspective that’s slightly different than what people expect. In turn, the short version of my position for this discussion is as follows:
Branding 2.0 is about leveraging the web 2.0 to deeply [...]

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I’ve been looking at a variety of potential frameworks in relation to the topic of prosumerism / customer co-creation. I linked to a couple last week, and have developed a few of my own over the past few years, but I continue to find 2 x 2s to be an interesting way to explore the [...]

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I’ve just been working through a very interesting report by Michael A. Stelzner (sponsored by the social media success summit) called How Marketers are using social media to grow their businesses. The data I found the most interesting was around time commitment, which is broken down into two key charts. The first is a graph [...]

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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 [...]

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There is a long-held belief in professional sports that the best athletes often make the worst coaches. The reason for this is simple – elite performers often have a natural ability to perform that there lesser counterparts do not possess, and in turn they are unable to really understand how to coach and develop their [...]

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“There are management consulting firms that charge really high rates. We wanted to come up with something that’s accessible to almost any business.”
This quote will ring true for many different people that have employed management consulting firms. In the worst cases, it appears that certain types of such companies merely send people in to work [...]

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Last week I wrote about the Motrin Mom fiasco, and then spent a fair bit of time thinking about the best way for a company to respond to the backlash that can so quickly emerge in the blogosphere (My favorite idea was a “You think you have a headache? You should see what we’ve had [...]

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As I’ve been researching the Facebook engagement metrics, my colleague Alan Majer reminded me about Facebook Lexicon – a cool application that allows you to track “count occurrences of words and phrases on Walls over time.” As I’ve played around with it today, I stumbled onto neat, simple story about how Starbucks has put together [...]

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As I discussed in my last post, I’m intrigued about the idea of exploring how customers engage with brands on Facebook. I’ve started compiling some data with the hope of coming up with some interesting metrics. While there are still a lot of details to iron out, I thought I’d toss up a few ideas [...]

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