Between South by Southwest and the Cognizant Community 2010 Conference, I’ve heard some fascinating presentations over the last couple of weeks. I want to tell you about one in particular, though, because it introduced me to whole new ideas about how we acquire information. The speaker was Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT […]
I don’t go to the South by Southwest conference for the sessions as much as for the people. The most interesting conversations usually happen outside of the conference rooms. One discussion that stuck with me this week occurred after a presentation by MIT’s Andrew McAfee entitled “What Does Corporate America Think of 2.0?” While I […]
The Joy Of Geocaching, a labor of love that my wife Dana and I have been working on seemingly since the Reagan administration, arrived at the publisher’s warehouse this week. This project began in July, 2008 and proceeded through many twists and turns – including the demise of our first publisher – before reaching the […]
Like many people, I was glued to my computer and smart phone much of last Saturday monitoring news of the massive earthquake in Chile and awaiting, with morbid anticipation, the possibility that it could trigger deadly tidal waves in other parts of the world. As the predicted 4 PM arrival of the first tsunami on […]
Businesses are spreading their social media wings in a big way, creating lots of new opportunity but also questions about how to manage their suddenly overflowing baskets of online goodies. Recent research I’ve been conducting into business adoption of multiple social media platforms is turning up some striking results. The 53 respondents to a survey I […]
Eric Schwartzman and I are deep into the research for our forthcoming book on business-to-business social media and lately we’ve been learning what makes communities tick. Online gathering places for business professionals actually predate the commercial Internet by more than a decade, having established themselves as an effective form of peer support back in the […]
In last issue’s Tip of the Week I told you about Posterous, the new service that radiates a person’s social media activity out to a network of community sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblrand Delicious. Posterous is one of a host of new services that automate the once-tedious manual process of cross-posting information to […]
I’ve recently worked with several companies that are trying to bring some order to their social media activities. I’ve found that most have the same problem: They’ve dabbled in blogs, Twitter and Facebook fan pages but after several months they lack traffic, followers and fans. They’re frustrated and confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a […]
In my column in BtoB magazine this month I discuss the contrasting media relations styles of two giants of the Internet age: Google and Apple. The column focused specifically on their communications styles, but I believe the business tactics of these two starkly different but successful companies have bigger significance. Google and Apple are diametrically […]
Ford Motor Company is widely considered to be an outstanding practitioner of social media marketing. Under the leadership of Scott Monty (more than 36,000 followers on Twitter), the company has created such innovations as the multimedia Ford Story website and the consumer-generated Fiesta Movement. So I was a little surprised recently when Scott told me, […]
