It will come as little surprise to readers here that businesses this year have been getting increasingly serious about social media as they find that their customers are spending a rapidly growing amount of time there. The most recent numbers show that Americans are spending nearly a quarter of their online time in social networks, far ahead of other forms of Internet activity. The numbers worldwide aren't much different and implications for businesses are many and varied. I've explored these extensively before and it goes well beyond such ideas like "Facebooking" the enterprise. Yet due to the top-down way most organizations operate, businesses continue to fall behind what's happening in the marketplace today. Unfortunately, the underpowered, non-scalable, expensive, and fundamentally...
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Does the relentless and never-ending flow of messages into your email inbox ever make you feel as if you’re being punished for something?
While social technology can automate and innovate many processes, I believe it is the human behind the technology that makes best-in-class customer service. To that end, connectedness is a quality I would recommend preserving and nurturing at the front lines. I explain this recommendation with a personal customer service story from Austin, Texas.
A few weeks ago, my colleague, Caroline Dangson, wrote about when to outsource social media responsibilities. Many companies outsource large portions, if not all, of their social programs to their agencies. Outsourcing happens for a few reasons, with the lack of internal resources and expertise being at the top of that list. However, as Caroline points out, companies should make the right investments in-house to maximize the return on their investment in social programs.
Two years ago, I joined Dachis Group as employee #1. This week, I start my third year with the company and it’s fun to glance back and see what we’ve accomplished. But it’s even more energizing to look ahead and see where we’re going…
Yesterday in Portland at OSCON’s Cloud Summit I spoke about major emerging trends in business, IT, and the Web. Specifically, I explored how Enterprise 2.0, Cloud Computing, and something known as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) have converged on top of the same “problem space” to become the essential fabric for how we solve the business problems in our organizations.
The abundance of opportunities to communicate in social media can be the medium’s greatest curse. Abundance means brands don’t consider their actions the way they do elsewhere where a scarcity demands a clear justification for participation. The result? Low-effort, but low-value communications that are a lot like white bread: cheap, easy and not particularly good for you. The fact is that brands can do better. They can eat whole wheat (even if it doesn’t taste as good).
In my last post I wrote about communication being an important aspect of knowledge work and decision making. I can sometimes get a little too academic with how things are supposed to work and so I thought I’d write a follow-up post that uses a concrete example (IRL for some) of how communication helped me and my colleague, Tom Cummings, just the other night.
The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order. We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.
If I could wave my magic wand and make one major change to accelerate our work in the social business design field, it would be to improve the often fraught relationship between ‘the business’ and IT departments.
This was a eventful week for brands in social media. Personalities representing brands were in the spotlight for entertaining us in Social Media Marketing and helping us in Social Media Servicing.