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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One of my primary research areas right now is “prosumerism” (think: producer + consumer = prosumer), which we use to describe what many people call customer co-creation: getting customers actively engaged in the innovation around, and creation of, the products and services they consume. One of the biggest questions in the space is around business [...]

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There’s a fantastic story on TechRadar today about “The Secret behind Threadless’ Success“. Like many other Web 2.0 success stories, the whole thing started as a hobby and almost accidently turned into a thriving business – with crowdsourcing shifting from something they were “unknowingly” doing to the center of their entire strategy. As co-founder Jake [...]

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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’m currently prepping for a presentation on Prosumerism to be delivered in May, which means I’m knee-deep in various frameworks related to the topic. Below are the two I’m focused on right now – the first from OMC Group Insight, and the second from Gary Hayes. Not much to say about them yet, but I [...]

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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 [...]

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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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Much of the research I am doing for nGenera’s Marketing & Sales 2.0 program is focused on what we call prosumerism. While I’m sure some eyes will roll in reference to yet another buzzword, I find it to be a useful one. It describes the process by which customers are becoming actively involved in the [...]

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Regular readers know that “prosumerism” – when consumers become actively involved in the creation of the goods and services they consume – is my primary research topic right now. Back in October I wrote about a piece I was working on called Broadcasting yourself: How important is it to YouTube’s Success? One of the key [...]

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