Analysis Paralysis - when you’ve got so much data that you stop making effective business decisions. It happens to the best of us. Perhaps more so now. Marketers and communicators engaging in Social Media are debating heatedly over what metrics are right, what exactly to measure and what to report and how…and so on. With [...]

On the darker side of Social Media, it can effectively be used as a weapon to discredit a competitors product or service. It can be used to discredit a person/celebrity or to even shake up a stock. More importantly, it does not just affect big corporations. Today, Social Media can be used as a competitive [...]

We provide a fair bit of training around using Social Media for selling. Most often we are asked “how do I turn friends into clients?” and we’ve seen this question posted on other blogs, by some prominent bloggers. This question has been posed by many. Given the many workshops and private consultations we’ve run, we’ve [...]

Peter Drucker said 40 years ago that a business need do only two fundamental things; market and innovate. With the advent of Social Media and it’s growing consumer adoption, the ability to “Market” has arrived. Over the years, business have only been able to “market” with a small “m”. So what’s the difference?
The practice of [...]

How many Social Media services are there? How many do you use? Our research shows over 300 blogging platforms, over 80 calendar services, 20 microblogging platforms, 200+ news feed services, numerous Web conferencing solutions, multiple Instant Messaging services, 300 plus variations on RSS feeders, over 20 Web-based sales automation and CRM solutions, 1000+ CMS solutions [...]

Consumers and buyers increasingly want companies to engage them in Social Media. Our experience has shown (and others too have noted this) that when we’re relly angry at a service or product we tell our friends and colleagues and not always the company we’re angry at. We might call the company’s customer service, but is [...]

What makes our world so incredible is the mix of cultures on this little planet. This diversity is exemplified and amplified in Social Media applications. One might ponder that Social Media could be a way of uniting us, resulting in less wars, greater societal wealth and more. Coming back to earth for a moment, there [...]

Facing the issue of dealing with foreign languages in Social Media engagement as a business is going to come up at some point. In the U.S. it’s dealing with Spanish, in Canada with French and increasingly Mandarin, Hindi or other dialects. Dealing with other languages is something Europeans are very familiar with, often either French, [...]

We believe there is now a clear divide on the Web. That of the Commerce Web and the Social Web. Many a business has invested heavily in a Web presence, from site creation and design, to carefully planned navigation and search engine optimization. We term this as the Commerce Web. It is where commerce takes [...]

A point of challenge for business looking to engage in Social Media, whether for marketing, sales or customer service, is one word; emtions. Having read an excellent post today on the Collective Thoughts blog about “empathy” in Social Media engagement, this brought to light the emotional element of Social Media.
As marketers and communicators in business [...]