• Meet Your New CEO — Your Kid
    [May 13, 2013] Summer time is usually one of the busiest times of the year for me in terms of extra curricular work related activities. I know that this may sound a bit weird, but it’s actually rather accurate. While most folks keep enjoying their summer vacation, or a relatively quieter time anyway, my busyness increases a notch [...]
  • Defining Corporate Listening In the Online Age
    [April 22, 2013] If you have been paying attention there is a pattern to my posts here at Biznology in the recent past. It’s quite simple. I am writing about listening in the corporate world. It’s not a new concept. Well, maybe it is. You may see listening in a corporate setting as something that happens between co-workers. [...]
  • ING Direct CEO Gives Employees “The Right to Complain”
    [April 1, 2013] While I was speaking at the Newsgator conference in Amsterdam I learned of a very interesting story at ING Direct (Canada). For those of you not familiar with ING Direct, it has around 1,200 employees and is based in Canada and operates things such as savings accounts, retirement plans, mortgages, and mutual funds. Their CEO [...]
  • The challenges and opportunities for teams working on social media
    [March 18, 2013] Last week, I took part in a great discussion about managing social media for teams. The event was a webinar organized by Our Social Times, the social media agency and event organizer run by Luke Brynley-Jones.
  • A trustworthy method for the new thought leadership model
    [February 25, 2013] The humour in this Dilbert cartoon – the boss talking about blogging his thoughts about his business when in reality it will be his employee doing the thinking and the writing – is a simple but good reminder that expressing opinion online is a lot about authenticity.
  • How Social Media is Sparking Organizational Transformation
    [February 4, 2013] It is with great pleasure that I share with you some exciting and hopefully helpful news. Salesforce and Altimeter Group recently collaborated on a special project to help executives understand the real impact of social media and in turn how to lead meaningful and lucrative transformation. The result is The Little Blue Book of Social [...]
  • Be More Interested In Your Client’s Success, Than Your Fee
    [January 7, 2013] There is a success factor behind every great business, which you can implement starting today. It can be summed up in just 4 words. It’s all about them! The most successful business owners have figured it out. They consistently look for ways to be of greater service to their clients or customers. They know that [...]
  • FourSquare Now Allows Business Owners To Add Their Own Events
    [December 17, 2012] According to an announcement made by FourSquare yesterday, business owners can now add their own events to their FourSquare venue pages. The feature used to only allow for events through their partners to be added, ESPN for sporting events, movietickets.com for movies and SongKick for concerts, but now business owners can add their own events. [...]
  • Measuring The ROI of Corporate Blogging
    [December 4, 2012] In a few weeks this business blog will be 9 years old. That’s 3,145 posts overall, of which I have written 2,537 myself.
  • Execs Not Using Social Media at Board Level Strategy
    [November 5, 2012] Stanford University's Rock Center for Corporate Governance, in conjunction with The Conference Board, surveyed more than 180 CEOs, senior executives, and corporate directors on what they know about social media and how they use it in their businesses.
  • Collaboration Use Cases for Executives
    [October 15, 2012] A few days ago my friend Karthik (who works at Salesforce) called me up to get some ideas and advice on collaboration use cases for senior executives. In other words, why would any C-level leader see value in supporting and using a collaboration platform such as Chatter, Yammer, Jive, and the like? It’s an interesting and good question because executives in many organizations may support the tools and strategies but oftentimes don’t use the tools themselves. Here are some of the top collaboration use cases for executives that I discussed with Karthik.
  • Successful Social Business Practices Need C-Suite Support
    [October 1, 2012] Twitter is not just for the kids. Smart business tweeters know that the network is a great tool in promotion, brand recognition and customer interaction. The same goes for other social media outlets - the number of them growing by the day. Read on to find out more.
  • Hey Web Site Owners, You STILL Get What You Pay For
    [September 10, 2012] I was struck by Jordan Kastler’s The Hidden Cost Of Cheap SEO & Social Media Labor because I wrote about this in the 1990′s.
  • How Much Should A Startup Founder/CEO Pay Herself?
    [August 20, 2012] Back in 2008, Peter Thiel did an interview at TechCrunch50 in which he said one of the most important things he looks at before investing is how much the CEO is getting paid.
  • Business owners: Are you being unreasonable?
    [August 6, 2012] If you just answered ‘no’ to the question in the title of today’s post, I’m going to suggest you start being unreasonable.
  • 3 Things To Keep In MInd When Growing Your Social Network For Business
    [July 16, 2012] A lot of businesses, large and small, consumer and B2B focused, are grappling with how the social web will be a tool for their business. Research is actually showing asocial media CEOs are bad for business. I've even heard from executives at digital marketing agencies, "I really need to learn this stuff myself" about social media applications and networks. So they start.
  • Maintaining Your Business When a Competitor Moves In
    [June 18, 2012] It's an exciting time when you launch a new business. All of the hard work and research finally comes to fruition when you get that first customer. It doesn't matter whether it's an online business or a brick-and-mortar store: being in business for yourself can be an exciting, wild ride.
  • When Employees Go Wild On Social Media
    [June 7, 2012] A good question from one of my students: During the lecture you touched on the topic of "control" in social media. But in any company internal as well as external conflicts are usually unavoidable and that can trigger posts and tweets which can affect the reputation of the company. How do companies assure that their employees uphold the reputation of the company and prevent scandals?
  • How and Why I Use LinkedIn Groups to Build My Business
    [May 21, 2012] As I've written here in the past, I think there are solid business reasons for participating in most social networks these days, but if your business sells primarily to other businesses, you must get more active on LinkedIn.
  • CEO Reputation Paramount In The See-Thru World
    [May 7, 2012] What role does the reputation of a company's chief executive play in the reputation of his or her company and, thus, the likely business success or failure of that company? It's a crucial question that draws some fascinating answers in the results of new research conducted by PR firm Weber Shandwick.
  • The Blog Tree: 50 Most influential UK blogs
    [April 26, 2012] The UK edition of The Blog Tree was announced today by Eloqua, listing their top 50 most influential UK blogs. It was terrific and humbling, to see this blog rated so highly, especially among so many great blogs in; marketing, PR, social media, tech, start-ups, SEO and design.
  • Why Website Owners Should Be Using Pinterest
    [April 9, 2012] A lot has been said and written about Pinterest in the past few weeks and months, from how marketers can use use it to drive traffic to how affiliate spammers are using it to generate income. However, I'm going to take a slightly "bigger picture" view of Pinterest.
  • The Cost of a Disengaged Employee
    [March 26, 2012] I've had a lot of interesting discussions lately around employee collaboration and one of the topics I've been having conversations around is employee engagement. Now before I go into more detail I want to stress that engagement in this case doesn't refer to activity on a platform such as submitting ideas, commenting, sharing status updates or anything else of that nature. That's typically something that some vendors in the industry like to focus on but in my opinion it's wrong. Activity is not the same thing as engagement. In this case engagement refers to employees being passionate about the work they do and the feeling of being connected to the company. So the question becomes, is engagement a fundable business case for employee collaboration? (even though the benefits of employee collaboration extend far beyond just engagement).
  • The Hierarchy of Getting The Important Stuff Done
    [March 12, 2012] There is always more that you want to do than you can humanly or otherwise actually do. That's just the nature of owning a business and the minute you let up it comes right back at you.
  • Humanize Yourself First, Then Humanize Your Business
    [February 29, 2012] Too often we forget that change needs to happen internally (our own behaviors) before we can expect anyone else to follow suit. It's like the manager who emails his team during the midnight hours but preaches work life balance on Monday morning. It's a valuable life lesson well beyond the little world of "social business" that we all live in. Just ask any parent.