MIT Sloan Management Review: How Companies Can Move Past a Trough of Disillusionment in Social Business Continue reading

I recently finished reading Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In. I've also researched and read many of the criticisms of the book. Some criticism is well-reasoned and some knee-jerk reaction. A growing meme of mockery is subtle in use of the phrase "lean in," and while this seems surface positive, it's not too difficult to see parallels to Linsanity that resulted in "a chink in the armor." Let me say this: it's easier to hate than to innovate. If you have not yet read the book, you can watch an executive summary in the form of Sandberg's 2010 TED... Continue reading

The post below is from my friend Jackie Huba. Her third book, "Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics" publishes on May 2nd and is available now for pre-order. I love the Pittsburgh Steelers. I was born near Pittsburgh and watched them win 4 four Super Bowls as I was growing up in the '70's. I run the Steelers fan club here in Austin. I own six Terrible Towels and went to the Super Bowl in 2011 to see the Steelers play. When I was considering getting a tattoo -- almost all Austin, Texas residents have one --... Continue reading

China is the world's largest digital market, with the most online users and social media participants. While brands can use many lessons learned regarding consumers and content, the unavailability of familiar channels requires marketers to better understand the nuances of China's digital marketing and social media landscape. Continue reading

Don’t assume that everyone who is loading information onto their blogs or pushing it onto Twitter is doing it in a sharing spirit of helpfulness. Continue reading

A couple of months ago, I got a speaking inquiry. The highlights: during SXSW, technology-related, and involves dogs. The first two parts were typical for me. The last wasn't. Call me intrigued. It turns out that Purina launched a new line of pet food earlier this year along with a companion training app called P5. Their first event was at the Super Bowl featuring Daryl "Moose" Johnston, who taught his 3-year old dog Gunner to catch frisbees and had his 11-year old daughter run Gunner through exercises they had learned leading up to the event. So the ask was easy... Continue reading

What is the capital of Tajikistan? Is there life on Mars? Who will win the 2013 World Series? All knowledge falls into one of three categories: the known, the knowable, and the unknown. Known: The capital of Tajikistan is Dushanbe. Knowable: NASA's Curiosity rover is currently running tests on Mars to determine if life exists. Unknown: While current odds favor the Angels, Tigers, and Dodgers, no one knows who will ultimately win baseball's Fall Classic. Now, think about measuring business results in social media. Getting to the knowable in social business On one hand, this is an easy task. You... Continue reading

Now, the image [Jasmine Mikulski] shot is a billboard off IH-35, perched atop the Whip In near the Woodland Ave. exit. It was put up by Ben & Jerry’s, which hosted a contest to find the best Instagram photos expressing the hashtag “#CapturingEuphoria.” Though she didn’t win any money...she’s enjoying the attention from having her photo blown up as a giant ad. "It’s local advertising with a local person. I think it was a really, really great use of social media," she said. -- "Instagram pic earns Austin designer her own billboard," austin360.com, 1/15/2013 Tweet Continue reading

Some highlights from the 150,000+ miles I flew during the past year. [View the story "2012 on the road" on Storify] Tweet Continue reading

I'm not writing as much here as I used to, but here are twelve posts from the past year that I enjoyed working on. 1/11 :: 101 Examples of Social Business ROI 2/2 :: Is social media free? 3/29 :: What Matters In Social Business? 4/6 :: Be curious, not furious 5/1 :: Sharing Social Business By Design #SBBD 6/5 :: sCRM: Stop me if you think you've heard this one before 7/5 :: Own the experience, own the future 8/6 :: I'm a free agent 9/10 :: What's next for business and why I joined @RGA 10/9 :: The... Continue reading

Various world and personal events from the past few weeks, coupled with the holiday season, have had me reflecting on work, life, and beyond. The context for the following insight is applicability to business strategy; however, you can see how easily it applies to other areas. People are bad at estimating how much pleasure or pain they will feel if their circumstances change dramatically. Social scientists have shown that when people undergo major changes in circumstances, their lives typically are neither as bad nor as good as they had expected. People adjust surprisingly quickly, and their level of pleasure ends... Continue reading

Source: "Push to exploit an ocean of information," Financial Times, December 9, 2012. Tweet Continue reading

"Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés." - Louis Pasteur, 1854 Although end-of-year trend forecasting pieces can be fun, they're usually not incredibly useful. However, I've been thinking about seven hot industry topics that deserve deeper attention. As the saying get paraphrased, chance favors the prepared mind; exploring these will set you up for success in the year ahead: Mobile. Think about why it matters and how it works. Big data. Start by learning about it and collecting it. Then do something with it. Social commerce. Focus on the bottom of the funnel and... Continue reading

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"The average American supermarket now carries 48,750 items, according to the Food Marketing Institute, more than five times the number in 1975. Britain's Tesco stocks 91 different shampoos, 93 varieties of toothpaste and 115 of household cleaner. Carrefour's hypermarket in the Paris suburb of Montesson, a hangar-like place filled with everything from mountain bikes to foie gras, is so vast that staff circulate on rollerblades." "You choose," The Economist, December 16 2010. Happy Thanksgiving! Tweet Continue reading

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." - Thomas Gray, 1742 "I always feel like...somebody's watching me." - Rockwell, 1984 This month's Scientific American contains a feature called The Story of Grand Central Station and the Taming of the Crowd. If you've ever been in a public transportation terminal at rush hour, you know that commuters expect the crowd to flow. In fact, when people disrupt flow intentionally or not, it causes issues. When a friend of mine first moved to New York, he told me how he used to stop to let people pass, which was courtesy... Continue reading

I usually don't upload presentation decks, but here's a summarized version of a topic I discussed a couple of times last month. Social Business and Beyond from Peter Kim For more detail on speaking sessions, there's a section on that. Tweet Continue reading

"Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people... Continue reading

One common approach to dissecting social business into its key components is separating people, process, and technology. You can find plenty of discussion out there about technology - just read TechCrunch every day. There have been a couple of good social business books written about people, like Open Leadership and Empowered. In The Connected Company, Dave Gray has written a book that brings it all together with an engaging and lucid right-brain perspective. Now, don't get me wrong. This isn't a book about finding and channeling your inner spirit animal or if your brand was at a party what type... Continue reading

Functional integration of ecosystems is emerging as the path towards maximizing value creation within our increasingly digital world. To own an industry leadership position, you need to own the experience. The more your products and services are integrated, the more money you make by offering a superior experience, and the less your competitors will be siphoning off user eyeballs, affiliate clicks, or active users. Brands typically establish barriers to exit, such as API limits or decreased data portability, but these actions lead to walled garden status, creating vulnerability to more open, extensible services. When planning and building your ecosystem of... Continue reading

There are a lot of voices out there when it comes to social business. There are also a lot of opinions on which voices matter. Who are the best experts? Who has klout? What about skills? When you step back and take note of topics that people generally focus on and engage around, patterns emerge. To get a full perspective on social business from theory to practice, it's important to subscribe/follow a cross-section of these key archetypes. The Architect These professionals deliver the theory, helping make the case for social business and identifying best practices being created as the industry... Continue reading

Consider this consulting question: "If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and the current level of technology, what would it look like?" Sounds like a contemporary social business question, right? It could be, but the original context predates "social business" by two decades. It's the key question from "Reengineering the Corporation," a classic business text. Its subtitle? "A Manifesto for Business Revolution." You probably know what happened with reengineering. It quickly gained a negative reputation for being a management fad and excuse to lay off staff. Not exactly business revolution. But no question, social business seems... Continue reading

The title of this post is borrowed of course from the classic coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton. It also happens to be a great phrase to describe what's happened to Facebook. This week as reported by TechCrunch, Facebook users have been hearing rumors that private messages - written in 2009 and earlier - were showing up on public timelines. Facebook investigated the claims and found them to be false and technically impossible to be true. But users are scrolling down their timelines and revisiting old posts on their timelines...and getting nervous. Why? Out of context, these public messages seem... Continue reading

If you travel frequently for work, you've stayed in plenty of hotels. And when you stay in plenty of hotels, you get exposed to the good, the bad, and the ugly of what happens when you use a common bed and bathroom that might be used by 364 different people over the course of a year. Surely you've seen the hidden video from an Atlanta hotel, where a housekeeper was seen using industrial cleaner on drinking glasses. Or maybe you've been bitten by bed bugs. It's tough to keep things clean in a hotel - my former colleague and travel... Continue reading