What Is An Expert?

What is an expert?  Is it a guru?  Is it someone who has thought deeply on the subject?  Or is it someone who has actually performed work and generated results?  So many people today are scrambling to become a social media experts, then it’s quite confusing to businesses looking for talented help.
The reality in [...]


Gaining Consensus – Why?

A challenging part of employing social media concepts within an organization or large company is getting everyone to agree. With so many parties with differing interests, one wonders how things ever get done.
I’d like to posit the idea that consensus is not required to explore the opportunities that social media present. Sure, you [...]


The ‘Un’ Sell

There’s a perspective that we take in social media that has many qualities and discussions around it and I’ve been starting to use a name or label for it: the unsell.
The idea behind the unsell is that you really aren’t selling at all, but rather letting the product or service speak for itself.  Past [...]


Run a blog? You’re a Community Manager too!

So you’ve got a blog, or maybe a Facebook page, or another profile on a social network or new media site somewhere out there.  Do you regularly post or update it? If so, it’s likely you have a community around it, whether or not you realize it.
You may have people who want to learn [...]


What Open Really Means

It’s hard to be a medium or large corporation these days.  The demands are not small, with expectations of investors, disappointing market performance, employee needs, government regulations and oversight… there’s almost no time left for the most important part of any business: customers.
Of course, that’s where the current craze around social media comes in.  The [...]


Enabling Trust in the Organization

We’ve all been there.  You’ve got a great idea that you wish you could find a way to share with the appropriate team at your company.  You’re not able to, because you’re not part of that team. Or that department.  Heck, it’s not even a field you’ve specialized in or worked in much, but [...]


Social Media and the 40 Hour Work Week

One of the more frequent questions I hear about social media, is around how much time should a person allocate towards it.  The answer is a lot simpler than it seems: lots.
For those looking at moving into a social media role, whether its a community manager, specialist, analyst, or strategist (hmm… lots of –ists in [...]


Words To Socialize By

Ever run across a phrase or two that you’ve heard that sums up things really well?  Short, simple, clear points that makes what you’re trying to say much easier to understand are always worth repeating.  So with that, here are a couple that I try to share with clients as they start exploring social media [...]


Living in the future

Several years ago (okay, more than a decade) there was a great keynote speech by James Burke at ACM 97 where he talked about ‘The Next 50 Years of Computing’.  Now, if you’ve seen James Burke’s Connections series, you know what he’s good at.  Describing the intertwining relationships of time, technology, and happenstance.
Here, a [...]


Getting Along with the IT Gatekeeper

I’ve been an IT guy for a darn long time, and as I’ve said before, it was a great career.  I’m sure I’ll revisit it from time to time – I’m too much a tech-geek to abandon it completely.  One thing I know from experience is that IT is many times a bigger bottleneck [...]


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