I’ll be speaking about social business strategy at the ASAE Technology Conference and Expo CIO Summit next week in Washington, DC. There are three key components to the conversation.
1) The Social Engagement Journey
The Journey is the recognizable progression of social engagement capabilities that large enterprise goes through on its way to becoming a social businesses.
2) The Relationship Progression
A number of luminaries participated on this week's W3C Social Business Jam, including Doc Searls (pictured), Alex "Sandy" Pentland and the inventor of the web itself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. A jam is "an online conversation among leaders in business, government and technology about the current state of social business, the future role that social technologies can play in improving the bottom line, and how social...
The big news today is that Google+ has finally announced their long-awaited brand pages with a blog post here. The top line, from Google:
For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you'll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.
A number of pages are already available (...
Almost seven years ago, in October 2004, I wrote The Social Customer Manifesto. It was short and sweet and it read like this:
THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER MANIFESTO
On August 18, 2011, a group including Tom Guarriello, Matthew Mahoney, Tim Bursch, Sean Bohan, Jeris JC Miller, Nancy White and Christopher Carfi held a Google+ Hangout to discuss different scenarios that were enabled by Google+'s announcement that it was working on capabilities for brands within G+, from both customer and brand points-of-view. The setup for the conversation is here:...
I was fortunate enough to luck into a few Spotify invitations earlier today, so I decided to try a little experiment in checking out click-through rates on Google+ vs. Twitter. I put similar offers up on Twitter and Google+ at the same time (7:38am PDT on a Thursday), and checked to see what drove traffic over to the blog. (I turned off comments on the Google+ offer, so folks could only go to the blog and to not split the sample.)
Twitter Offer
Google+ Offer
...
For the past few days, I've been neck-deep in Google+. There's a lot of potential here for business. Some thoughts, by enterprise function.
Marketing There's going to be plenty of punditry by the social media echo chamber over the coming days and weeks that will mirror the things we saw regarding Facebook ca. 2007-2009 or so. The summary: the same folks who are doing things to promote their schtick using Facebook will do the same thing on Google+. There will be brand pages and the like, someone will figure out how to do contests, there will be a host of activity metrics ("how many people...
A new offering called Facebook Social Deals was launched in five cities today. It's a service similar to Groupon or LivingSocial, where merchants offer highly discounted, time-sensitive deals to their customers. The product is well-integrated with the overall Facebook experience, it's not intrusive, and it has sociality built-right-in, enabling individuals to not only buy deals, but also promote them to their networks using other familiar capabilities such as the Facebook "Like" button.
It may be a mortal blow to Groupon, the current leader of the daily deals pack.
The illustrative example here for Groupon may be a company from Bubble 1.0 called PointCast. PointCast was the hottest property on the dotcom block, and had been the target of a $450 million buyout...
Just back from SXSW in Austin. Here are my Top 10 takeaways.
Delta Airlines saved my ass today after Alaska screwed up, royally. Delta went way above and beyond and, either through process or (more likely) through employee empowerment, got me where I needed to go against all the odds. Here's what happened.
Last night, I boarded am Alaska/Horizon flight for San Jose to Boise to go skiing with my family for the long weekend. I'd had a meeting earlier in the day in the Bay Area, so Lisa and the kids had gone ahead and had already flown to Boise and were going to pick me up at the airport when I arrived. My flight takes off; I'm on one of the high-wing twin prop Bombardier Q400s on the last flight of the day. The flight takeoff was delayed about an hour as the Alaska flights were all delayed due to weather, but no big deal.
About an hour into the flight as we are about to hit the Sierras, the pilot comes on saying that the in-flight wing deicing system is showing a failure/warning light, and that out of an abundance of caution, we...
