Exploring social business strategy

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A prosumer approach to brand as movement

March 2nd, 2010 · No Comments

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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Tags: marketing

Thinking about some Facebook usage statistics

February 4th, 2010 · No Comments

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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Tags: business · marketing · social media

The Web 2.0, good sushi, and a wonderful case of creative destruction

January 14th, 2010 · No Comments

When it comes to the Web 2.0 and the process of “creative destruction”, a lot of people associate it more with the latter word than the former. After all, we hear story after story of entire industries being washed away – and what replaces them simply doesn’t provide a livelihood for nearly as many people.
So [...]

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Tags: economics · social media

StickK: I love this idea, partially because I also came up with it

December 9th, 2009 · No Comments

Very early in my career, I was told there are very few new ideas out there – if you’ve thought of it, somebody else probably has as well. What’s rare is for people to actually do something with the idea. So I find it quite amusing when I see people get all upset about somebody [...]

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Tags: business · social media

Localbacon: improving the customer experience by making them pay

November 30th, 2009 · No Comments

In most cases, getting something for free is preferable to paying for it. But now always. One example I’ve always found intriguing on this front is online dating sites. If you’re (say) a very attractive female, it’s HIGHLY likely that you will be inundated with messages from potential suitors. But by making the suitors pay [...]

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Tags: business · economics · social media

Stigmergy, community building, and social media

November 27th, 2009 · 1 Comment

On Monday my colleague Naumi Haque sent me a link to an interesting article by Professor Francis Heylighen titled “Why is Open Access Development is so successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information“. It provides a great overview of open access / self-organizing systems in relation to traditional economic theory, but the part I [...]

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Tags: economics · social media

Twitter popularity and Marvel Comics: an interesting difference between follower and list counts

November 20th, 2009 · No Comments

As part of my ongoing research, I’ve been paying close attention to developments around Twitter’s “list” feature (launched in October) – “A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts.” Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting finding (that has me scratching my ahead a bit) in relation to follower [...]

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Tags: business · social media

Twitter, and the challenge of innovating while having an open API

November 12th, 2009 · No Comments

I was just reading about the Trouble at Twitter – how U.S. visitors were down 8% in October – on Tech Crunch. The CEO mentions that they’re hoping a “slew” (currently a couple) of new features will help revive growth on the site – such as the retweet button, lists, and geolocation features. It very [...]

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Tags: social media

Will 'paranormal activity' kill the 'snakes on plane' mindset?

October 14th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: marketing · social media

Leading brands from different parts of the Twitter Matrix

September 30th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: marketing · social media