Digital Transformation: easy to say, hard to do

WHERE WE’VE BEEN Ten years ago, I wrote the post coining the term “social business” to describe a growth opportunity for brands beyond social media strategies at that time. Dion Hinchcliffe and I eventually wrote a book to unpack the concepts, illustrated in this graphic: Today, “social business” has reverted back to its original meaning …

Quick take on what’s hot in digital right now

There’s a lot of noise in the marketing world, with industry players from all angles talking about what’s now and what’s next. What that in mind, I have some thoughts on the hottest topics that will be big bets for the near future: AI Once the stuff of science fiction, now part of the real …

What’s in a name? #gTLD

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; – Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet With the rollout of new gTLDs, it’s just a matter of time until the .com addresses we have grown familiar with over the past 15 – 20 years start to disappear. Here are …

Review: The Connected Company by @davegray

One common approach to dissecting social business into its key components is separating people, process, and technology. You can find plenty of discussion out there about technology – just read TechCrunch every day. There have been a couple of good social business books written about people, like Open Leadership and Empowered. In The Connected Company, Dave Gray has written a book that brings it all together with an engaging and lucid right-brain perspective.

Customers are connecting. Are you?

RFPs and strategic thinking

RFPs can be used as an effective tool to assist purchasing decisions. They help buyers compare offerings along similar criteria in order to highlight differences and facilitate evaluations. RFPs can play an important role in executing on the strategic planning process – business goals are assessed, capabilities and gaps defined, then companies act to close the gaps by building or buying. These are key activities that must be completed before issuing a RFP.

A RFP is not a shortcut for the strategic planning process. If you don’t have these answers, soliciting 50-page documents from service providers won’t solve this problem for you. Like strategy, RFPs shouldn’t be identical, even when companies in the same industry seek to purchase similar services. This may sound quite obvious, but you might be surprised at the lack of strategic thinking that goes into many social media RFPs today.

Groundswell and social business: moving towards maturity

Current state. Yesterday I covered general updates to Groundswell and specifics around Twitter. The other major update to Groundswell focuses on attaining social maturity and provides a model where companies can self-identify and determine what’s needed to progress further. Most companies are clustered around the middle of the bell curve when it comes to maturity, …