LinkedIn and I have worked on several research projects together over the years ranging from the future of Native Advertising (private) to the state of Relationship Economics. Now, we banded together once again to explore the art and science of thought leadership. Although this time, I was on the contributing side of the research project and Jason Miller, LinkedIn’s senior manager of content marketing, was the lead. Thought leadership is one of those things that’s easier to talk about than…
Digital is Just a Means to Reach People…It’s How and Why You Use It That Matters
Splendida Notizia! #WTF is going on in Italy? The future of business is turning a new page…that’s what. I’m excited to announce that What’s the Future of Business: Changing the way businesses create experiences is now available in Italy. To celebrate the launch, I spent some time with Luca Conti, new media strategist, Italian blogger, journalist, and author of several books on social media. In our discussion, we explored the future of business and why the time is now for…
Only companies with impeccable customer service will survive the Zombie Apocalypse
Guest Post by Peter Shankman, Author of Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans Imagine a world where decisions aren’t made based on anonymous reviews with no validation on sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor, but rather, through trusted sources in your own network. Imagine that world is automatic – If you want to take a vacation in Fiji, you don’t have to ask which of your friends have gone, you simply start searching for Fiji – on any…
The Future of Business Starts with Us
I often share a quote by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” And that’s where are in business. We all talk of change but very few of us start with changing the very things that will help us more effectively compete for the future. The evolving state of technology, customer behavior and expectations and our role within each is changing or it should change… What we see (perspective and…
Pivot: The Emergence of Digital Compels Businesses to Transform
Guest post by Mike Edelhart, co-producer and CEO of The Pivot Conference (@pivotcon) Historic shifts in business fundamentals don’t occur smoothly; rather they happen in sudden, sharp shifts which open unexpected chasms companies must traverse or plunge. Today, the deep change in human behavior brought about by the emergence of social media marks the latest such shift, perhaps the most dramatic since the Industrial Revolution. Gone are the traditional success factors of operational efficiency and price advantage being uprooted by…
Pivot: The Total Digital Experience
The Pivot Conference in NYC in October is unique among events in that, each year, it shifts focus to deeply reflect the needs of its community of senior business transformation executives from leading brands and organizations. To make that happen, I serve as Pivot’s Executive Producer along with Pivot CEO, Mike Edelhart. For four years in a row, we’ve put our heads together to develop a story arc that covers the hottest, emergent trends, presented by the industry’s most engaging…
A Manifesto for Building Relationships in the Digital Era
Not too long ago, my dear friend Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) and I set out to explore a new world of visual communication that combined an intentional form of written storytelling illustrated through clever yet pithy cartoons. That work was originally brought to life in #WTF (What’s the Future of Business). The engagement around Hugh’s work eventually spilled over from print to online with readers sharing their favorite Hugh cartoons via Tweets, Instagrams, Vines, Pinterest, et al. We were inspired to…
Introducing N3TWORK, A Mobile Television Network Powered by Interests and Context
Early on, I was one of the first analysts to explore the dynamics of the interest graph versus the social graph in social networks. Think Twitter vs. Facebook. I learned right away that interest graphs tend to share connections based on topics rather than relationships. I also found that every person possesses a series of 6-10 interest graphs that together form a social graph. Google refers to these groupings as “Circles.” The notion of manually organizing people by interests though…
WTF of Business at Saddleback Leather Co.
Guest post by John Bergquist (@JohnFlurry), who leads Content and Communications at Saddleback Leather Co. So much has changed in business in the past 20 years. And it continues to change daily. As Brian has said before, today a business has to engage… or die. And you know what? That delights me. It is the way it used to be. Shopkeepers knew their customers very well. They didn’t need mechanical analysts or teams of test consumers to determine how to…
A New Era for Search: The Zero Moment of Truth is Now Defined by Shared Customer Experiences
This is the story of when ZMOT met UMOT… Search is a natural step in the discovery process. In a web world, search engines offer a lens into a qualified and structured view to help online consumers focus and make informed decisions. With Google dominating search, marketers concentrated on improving search ranking through tried and true techniques to ensure that what they were marketing earned a coveted position in the likely search results a customer might consider clicking. Search is…
