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 …

Why fail fast is bad advice

Every now and then, we all get involved in a conversation that's already in progress. Most people will listen and ask questions to establish context and meaning. Without comprehension, remarks can be misconstrued and advice misapplied. A popular piece of advice in social media is "fail fast." Or even extended to "fail fast, fail forward, …

Aggregate or be aggregated

An idea has been floating around in my head ever since we began working with Workstreamer.  Or maybe not just an idea as much as the seed for a manifesto.  Perhaps just a strategic principle. Aggregate or be aggregated. It’s been bugging me for months, with roots in the portal wars of the mid-1990s.  At …

PR Week: The Next Digital Era

Next week, I'll be in New York to attend PR Week's "The Next Conference," described as a one-day summit on the most important trends in PR.  Edelman has invited me to participate and I'll be moderating a panel called "The Next Digital Era," which includes Steve Rubel from Edelman Digital, Mark Donovan from comScore, and …

How to set an ego trap

I’ve been thinking lately about what I call the social media ego trap.  In a nutshell, social technologies use game mechanics to get users hooked on participation.  People often get addicted to ego-stroking system feedback, until they can temper their usage (addiction?) in terms of utility vs. serendipity. But what if you’ve got something to …

The known, knowable, and the unknown

When I was in business school, my strategy professor Jeanne Liedtka introduced a framework for strategic thinking that I use quite often, based on Fitch’s paradox of knowability:  any issue can be broken into three distinct parts:  the known, knowable, and unknown. This may seem like a simple framework, so let’s apply it to something …

Being: Peter Kim