Part 4 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual… It seems that adding the word “social” to any category escalates its importance. From the Social Customer to Social Commerce and from Social Business to Social CRM, the common thread that weaves everything together is people. It is people after all that are responsible for placing the social in social media. Everything else is just technology. So why is it that businesses still approach social…
Facebook now the size of the Internet in 2004
Source You’ve all heard the stat, if Facebook were a country, it would be the the third largest in the world. That stat was initially shared when Facebook hit 500 million users. Now the site has more than 800 million users and a new comparison that’s worthy of blog posts, tweets and conference presentations…Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did in 2004, which ironically is the year Facebook debuted. According to data released by Pingdom, Facebook…
Our Digital Society in the Next 30 Years: An Interview with John Battelle
The next episode of (R)evolution features a very special guest and someone whose work I’ve followed longer than I care to count. Among many things, John Battelle is the co-founder of Wired, Founder of Federated Media and Executive Producer of the Web 2.0 Summit. He’s also the author of an upcoming book, What We Hath Wrought, which gives us a forecast of the interconnected world in 2040. While the book isn’t scheduled to release until early 2013, the foundation for…
Social Media Customer Service is a Failure!
Part three in a series introducing The End of Business as Usual…Written by Frank Eliason (@frankeliason) Certainly not a statement you would expect to hear from the person formerly known as @ComcastCares, but I think it is an important perspective to consider if we are to build stronger relationships with customers. As I look around I see many interesting aspects of social media from large and small businesses. and I am very excited to see companies trying new things to…
Social Media’s Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes and Unfollows
This is part two in a short series to introduce The End of Business as Usual…originally posted on Harvard Business Review (edited) There’s an old saying that carries renewed meaning these days: Give the people what they want. Brands are furiously creating profiles in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in the hopes of building engaging communities with customers and giving people what the brands think they want. The main activity in this effort is to spur consumers to…
Digital Darwinism: Who’s Next?
This is the first part in a short series to introduce The End of Business as Usual… Change is inevitable, but it is rarely easy. Among the greatest difficulties associated with change is the ability to even recognize its need at a time when we can actually do something about it. Sometimes, when we finally realize that change is inevitable, the vision or energy needed to push forward in a new direction is elusive. Or worse, when competitors recognize the…
How Marketing Automation will Need to Evolve to Survive
Meghan Keaney Anderson is a marketing manager at HubSpot, a marketing software company in Cambridge, MA that makes marketing automation software. We are all seeking a way to scale personal attention. The great promise of marketing automation is that it enables you to trigger messages based on a visitor’s actions on your site, ideally sending messages when they are most relevant rather than spam. But whether you are a B2B or B2C marketer, you can recognize that buyer-behavior is ever-changing….
Marcel LeBrun of Salesforce Radian6 on the Future of Social Media Monitoring
Radian6 is one of the industry’s leading social media management platforms and was recently acquired by Salesforce. I was invited to join Salesforce at its recent Social Advisory Board meeting during its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where I had an opportunity to sit down with Marcel LeBrun, SVP and GM of Salesforce Radian6. As part of a special edition series of Revolution, Marcel and I discussed the evolution of monitoring and listening and the important role learning and…
Whoops, I didn’t mean for you to read this
As the line between social media and privacy continues to erode, I often think about these words by Gabriel García Márquez, “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” Sometimes in social media, we intentionally or often, unintentionally, blur the lines between who we are (outward facing), who we are (introspectively), and who we want to be. A recent example of such a mistake is when former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner accidentally published a…
The New Facebook: A Timeline for Personal Discovery and Storytelling
“For the first time ever in a single day we had 500 million people use Facebook” – Mark Zuckerberg For those who focus on the debate between Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter are missing the true story. Today at Facebook’s f8 developer conference we were reminded about what the story really is…you and me. No, it’s not about features, capabilities, or the number of users. We were reminded about the power of something much more important, our experiences, relationships, the…