Exploring social business strategy

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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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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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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I’ve been doing quite a few presentations on Twitter lately, and in each one I admit I’m still on the fence about the whole thing. At it’s best, I find it to be a very useful source for finding information I would otherwise have never located. But at the same time, I’m frustrated by the [...]

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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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The proper metrics for social media have always been difficult to pin down, but I think there’s been an interesting cycle that’s emerged over the last few years. Before twitter exploded in popularity, comment counts on blogs were often used as a crude measure of community engagement  – the number of people willing to take [...]

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Yesterday I wrote fairly extensively about Whole Food’s presence on Twitter, making regular references back to the 2×2 Twitter Brand Engagement Matrix I’d developed a few weeks ago when discussing their many different accounts. Another company I’ve been looking at fairly extensively is Dell, which has roughly 50 different accounts operating on Twitter. As part [...]

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