I recently had the privilege to work on a very special project with my friends at GapingVoid and LinkedIn. We set out on a creative endeavor to explore the intersection of story, art, humor and candor as a means of fostering self-reflection and inspiring personal and professional change. The result is a something I’m very proud of…a new short and sweet but compelling ebook, Once Upon a Digital Time: How to be an amazing storyteller when everyone is a “storyteller.”…
LinkedIn.com: Marketing Book Worth a Look, ‘X: The Experience When Business Meets Design’ by Brian Solis
“Everyone wants great experiences in their life. In business, great experiences are the one thing that’s often missing. Customers aren’t always happy, especially those who ever have to contact customer service. Reports show consistently that customers want better experiences and executives think they’re delivering as such, yet only 8% of customers agree. That’s a pretty amazing gap.”
LinkedIn: Why We’re Hungry for Remarkable Content [Infographic]
Did you know that 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced daily? In the last 30 years, we as humans have produced more information than in the previous 5,000. We check our phones 110 times a day and email 30 times every hour. Social media has overtaken everything to become the number one activity on the web. Getting attention has never been harder or more important. Yet many marketers continue to contribute to the content glut rather than lead the…
Attention is a Gift: Once you have my attention, why should I care?
I’m frustrated that my worth is measured more by the numbers of followers, views or visitors that I have and not the merit or impact of my work. You too must start to feel discontent when it comes to your work being judged on hollow numbers alone. The ability to cause effect or change behavior is true influence and that’s the core of what we stand for. Numbers do not mean much. Without purpose and intention, our work becomes part…
The Expertise Gap is Real and Employees Need Your Attention Now
The biggest challenge is not in the understanding or expertise associated with new technology. We can learn that. The biggest problem is our inability to recognize that the experience we have today is not the experience we need going forward. A notable separation exists between the expertise people have or are learning and the jobs companies need to hire for in an increasingly digital economy. This means that current employees possess expertise to perform jobs that are losing prominence in…
Employees are as or More Important Than Customers: Why Ignoring Employee Engagement Hurts Business
In a late 2013 study, Gallup found that only 13% of workers actually feel engaged at their jobs. What’s worse is that 63% of the workforce is not engaged at all. But wait, the news gets even more disheartening. An astounding 24%, one-quarter of the global workforce, is actively disengaged right now. Essentially we have a significant number of workers doing their best impression of corporate zombies who go through the everyday motions to collect a paycheck. So are employees…
The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Thought Leadership
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…
The Top 25 Socially Engaged Companies on LinkedIn Invest in Employee and Customer Relationships
LinkedIn and Altimeter Group published a joint report on the value of corporate social media and its role in customer and employee engagement. To do, we formed a baseline of companies that were actively engaged on a platform we could effectively study. After eight months of research, we assembled a list of the Top 25 Socially Engaged Companies based on how they use LinkedIn to engage employees and customers in the following areas: 1. Content marketing 2. Employee engagement 3….
3 short videos on innovation, surviving conferences and cringe-worthy career moments
Every now and then, I take a step back away from research, writing and the relentless barrage of disruption and innovation to go through my inbox, favorites, bookmarks, etc., to see what’s worth revisiting. To my surprise, I’d forgotten about three fun, short 60-second videos that I shot for LinkedIn on location at SXSW 2013. While short, I was thoughtful in my responses to three important yet diverse questions. As such, I’m hoping that they might either help or entertain…
Pinterest Rivals Twitter in Referral Traffic
To those of you who lead “the Pinteresting life,” you’ve contributed to a phenomenon that is certainly putting its clicks where the hype is. By that I mean, Pinterest is a two-year old cultural sensation that is borderline causing dependency among its users and the rabid audiences they’re developed. This rapid fire network has pinned itself to a rocket with estimated unique viewership ascending 429% from September to December 2011…and I’m not even sure if the sky’s the limit here….