Six years, $60 million, and all I got was this stupid hoodie.

Voting for SXSW 2015 sessions has started. If I get the chance to speak next year in Austin, I’d like to tell you about the last six years of my working life. Between 2008 – 2014, I committed my time, energy, and intellect to build a startup company as the first employee into a multi-million dollar, multi-national social …

Bringing digital innovation to the retail experience

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks in Seoul getting up to speed on my team’s capabilities as well as our assets across the network. Last week, Cheil client Samsung introduced a new digital showroom experience called “CenterStage.” I just got here so I can’t take any credit for the build, but I can certainly be …

Articles about startup life that I’ve found interesting.

  In July 2008, I took a job at a startup — a very different type of company than the large publicly traded corporations I had worked for while building my career. While we were a bit different than the classic “two guys coding in a garage” archetype, many of the articles I’ve seen written about …

Social Business Index: Bringing the Left Brain into Social Business

For the most part, traditional marketing is dominated by right-brain activity. Creativity, visualization, intuition – those characteristics drive success for brands in the media landscape. Quick, think of some of your favorite brand campaigns. Maybe Apple’s 1984 spot. Or 20 years later, Mitsubishi’s See What Happens. Maybe more recently, Old Spice Guy or The Most Interesting Man In The World.

Similarly, participating in social media is a right-brain activity. It’s full of spontaneous self-expression and person-to-person community engagement. Brands receive recognition for using these new communication channels in innovative ways – whether Comcast using Twitter for customer service, Nike splicing hundreds of user videos together to create The Chain, or Dell taking to blogs to share information during a product recall. As brand participation in social media grew commonplace, analysts (like me) and managers began to wonder – is there a way to make sense of this? And if so, does it matter?

The Dachis Group Collaboratory

At Dachis Group, we call our corporate blog the Collaboratory. I cross-post all of my social business thoughts there and it’s where the collective intelligence of our company surfaces when our professionals can budget thinking time outside of client service obligations. Over the past week or so, there’s been some great content posted in the …

New dogs and old tricks

Shel Israel recently wrote an elephant-identifying post titled Why SM Consultants are Coming in From the Cold. I call it an elephant-ID post because it focuses on industry mechanics that are all around us, but no one is talking about directly. To summarize what stood out to me in Shel’s post – social media is …