Successful Workplace

After so many years in technology, I find it hard to see the newest trends as completely new. I’ve become a cynic about hype. Things have cycled so many times in my career that every new fad reminds me of  highly touted ‘movements’ like CORBA and artificial intelligence, and once-hot platforms like MySpace and AOL. […]

We live in a brave new social world, proven today by the death of Margaret Thatcher and the rise of the hashtag #NowThatchersDead. It seems too many people failed to capitalize the proper letters, leaving legions of Cher fans with the belief their idol left to join Sonny when they saw #nowthatchersdead. These are the […]

Today, US-based comedian and host of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, had a war of words with the President of Egypt on Twitter. Think about that for a just a minute. Social media has now become a channel for international debate involving not the citizens, but their leaders. This was inconceivable just a few years […]

While writing a recommendation for a friend on LinkedIn earlier this week, I realized I was doing something that I couldn’t have imagined doing few years ago. You’re probably thinking, ‘Sure, it’s not like LinkedIn has been around forever’. But it wasn’t about LinkedIn. It was more about the recommendation itself. It was for someone […]

There are stories showing up now saying that social media is a trend that is becoming played out and on the downside of its hype cycle. I would argue that’s not at all true. What’s happening instead is a gradual envelopment of all forms of activity by social media platforms suited to engagement. Social isn’t […]

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced last week that Chatter will become the de-facto front end of Salesforce going forward. In a statement Benioff talked about the rise of how people are connecting and the use of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, all of which are based on streams of user activity. He then went on to […]

Texting in meetings is considered by many to be unprofessional and rude. If there was any doubt, asking that question recently on LinkedIn released a torrent of emotion that made it clear that some people feel very, very strongly against it. After watching weeks of emphatic responses and a few descriptive comments on how texters […]

An article in today’s TechCrunch summed it up nicely: Twitter Study Shows Its Mobile-First Users Are Younger, More Engaged And Easier to Market To. If you don’t see what that means, repeat it to yourself again. There’s money in mobile-first The world is ultimately driven by economic models and Twitter is telling us that social interaction […]

22 year olds should design everything. I am just 22 years old and I’ve decided that’s the first line on my resume. I turned 22 just a few days ago and it was an opportunity to reflect. I decided we live in an oligarchic society ruled by just a few men with receding hairlines. This is […]

Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins today blogged his Top 15 technology predictions for the next 5 years leading up to 2018. I didn’t find too many rolls of the dice. For many there will be no big surprises; Mobile (tops the class for disruption), Social, Cloud, Big Data but here Brian splits the pack down further […]

The following is a guest post by Paul LaBelle, a marketing and corporate communications executive with deep experience in the software industry. A former journalist, Paul lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome to the party There’s a party happening today on more than 1.5 million PCs, laptops and mobile devices worldwide as tibbr celebrates its second birthday.  […]

I am not talking about the Facebook user with one million friends. I am not talking about the social humanitarians who are saving the world one tweet at a time. I am talking about our social media alter egos. Every super hero from Batman to Superman to Spider Man has an alter ego. By day […]

It doesn’t matter whether you’re reaching out to Aunt Shirley or your customer, being social in the wrong way breaks what I call the ‘social contract’. The social contract is the tacit understanding of why people follow, subscribe, arrive at a site or click on a link. Break the contract and you will not be […]

In the last 12 months we’ve seen a big push from the new media marketers and enterprise social vendors towards promoting both the connected enterprise and the connected customer. Mobile and social paradigms are shaping the industry landscape at phenomenal pace and businesses are seriously struggling to keep up. But there’s a massive disconnect between […]

The business world can learn a lot about promotion from the arts community. http://www.CoverYourFriends.com is a video blog website that features singer-songwriters playing songs written by their friends and fellow artists who inspire them.  It’s classic cross-promotion. The site was conceived and launched by Connor Garvey, a young performing songwriter from Portland, ME.  It started as […]

The biggest challenge of social media marketing is figuring out if it really delivers value for the effort. Looking across articles, forums and the few books on the topic yields lots of advice on tracking likes, retweets and followers, but what do those metrics matter if companies aren’t turning campaigns into leads and revenue? Part […]