CSRA Milestones: Ten Years of Experiential Social Media

CSRA Milestones: The First Ten YearsCSRA milestones reflects on my first ten years of experiential social media, seen through the eyes of clients I’ve served. I’ll share what I learned about what outcomes we got in each engagement as well as how it happened that I developed and pioneered experiential, which if a repeatable process for developing trust and profit at scale.

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Social Media Strategy Good Practices

Social media strategy good practices is a short list of principles that can make your firm stand out when empowering customer and employee experience. It’s part of a talk I gave today to a large multidisciplinary team. Their venerable institution plans to use social media strategy to get the ducks in a row without too much squawking. The most exciting aspect of social media strategy is that there’s so much room for improvement: while your peers and competitors are trying to “engage” with finely crafted-yet-impersonal content, you can power past them using experiential social media, which focuses on scalable interaction.

Social Media Strategy Good Practices: summary

Here are the cliff notes to the good practices part of our discussion:

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Big Data Practical Primer: Junk Charts' Kaiser Fung

Big Data Practical Primer: the book

[UPDATED] Big Data Practical Primer is my notes from Kaiser Fung’s presentation at Big Frontier in which he highlighted his new book, Numbers Rule Your World. Big data is a simple word, but its nuances are critical and require a new way of thinking. This presentation did a good job of covering many high-level definitions and issues of big data & analytics and combined those with some practical how-tos that may surprise you. It can be fairly easy to make serious impact, but, as I suggest in Insights, the biggest barrier to big data is one of imagination and the requirement to think creatively about using data correctly to make business decisions that pay off.

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Social Business in Insurance: State Farm's Chicago Coworking Space

social business in insurance: State Farm's Next Door taps The Social Channel to engage millennials/Gen YNext Door Chicago is a newish concept for State Farm Insurance that’s a great example of social business in insurance. It differentiates the firm by interacting in the Social Channel. The Lincoln Park/Lakeview community center and coworking space is notable because its DNA is empowering people to improve their lives through financial education. Next Door offers free coworking space and wifi, classes on financial management that are free of product pitches, free events (some financial, some art showings and other diverse events), free conference rooms and an energetic environment. Only the optional coffee bar is paid.

Next Door’s main online presence is oriented toward free membership. Members can book space, sign up for classes and hold events. Here’s IDEO’s case study on the concept and design process.

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Recruiting: How Firms & People Can Use Social Networks to Win

In Recruiting Reinvented, the CEO of Reppify, which advises firms on using social networks to find job candidates, shared several nuggets for candidates, with a glaring omission that I’ll reveal below. Keep in mind that the focus of the interview was on how firms could use social to up their game, so the nuggets went unnoticed, except over here! One of Reppify’s core offerings is advising firms to use social networks to discover and engage candidates, but without setting off any legal land mines. I’m assuming that Reppify, in addition to screening candidates for clients, creates templated workstreams for their clients to improve recruiting while reducing risk.

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The Twitter-LinkedIn Breakup: How to Manage Your Ecosystem Better

The Twitter-LinkedIn Breakup: How to Manage Your Ecosystem BetterThis week Twitter and LinkedIn canceled their agreement for easy cross-posting, which begot numerous indignant comments from people who seemed to have forgotten that they were using free infrastructure. Social business platforms are built and managed by venture-backed firms that need to execute on evolving business models, so we can all expect sudden changes from any and all. However, with some foresight and preparation you and your firm can minimize disruptions, which we’ll cover here. Even better, the LinkedIn-Twitter dustup provides strategic insights into how to operate within the digital social ecosystem, and we’ll address those, too.

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Executive's Guide to Blogging

Three-Step Executive's Guide to BloggingThis Executive’s Guide to Blogging offers executives a pragmatic, conservative approach to blogging. For years, now, I have beseeched all the executives and “knowledge workers” I know (that’s thousands) to blog, so please consider this as part of that campaign—with benefits (because this is a how-to post). Here’s why: In the Knowledge Economy’s pervasive digital networks, you are invisible unless you come across people’s screens regularly. And, while you are invisible, your potential business partners are seeing people who do flit across their screens. If you aren’t there, you are in a bloody ocean that gets smaller every year. Don’t stay in, the water is not fine. Please understand that I’m stating this as a simple fact. I’m sure you’ve read books like The Long Tail, which describe how we are all publishers now, that is, those of us who decide to use the free tools at our disposal.

Blogging is 21st century thought leadership, which is table stakes in the Knowledge Economy. Your thoughts represent and “scale” you, so they help you to connect with people with whom […]

Quick Notes: How to Build a Vibrant Google+ Page

Quick Notes: How to Build a Vibrant Google Plus PageEveryone wants to know the secret sauce, how to build vibrant communities in digital social venues. Here is a question to a community manager to whom I responded recently in a gated enterprise forum. The question was, “What are some effective ways to improve circle count and follower engagement on google+?” Read on for some general pointers and references for further reading.

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Why Google+ Should Be on Executives' Radar

Why Google Plus Should Be on Executives’ Radar explains Google’s new social network and why it commands attention; it changes the context of social networks.

Why Google Plus Should Be on Executives' Radar

The launch of Google’s new social network has poignant significance for executives—in predictable and surprising ways. Google+ is exceptionally significant because it is an exciting new social venue with the potential to disrupt, but even more important, it can teach us about how the ecosystem works and how organizations can learn to use it to garner support for things they care about. Here I’ll outline my first impressions and give general guidance for executives to take advantage of Google+’s potential.

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CSRA Launches Social Business Platform Power Site

Executive’s Guide to Social Networks Consolidates Several Top10 Blogs, Prepares Expansion

news_flashCSRA, the Creator of the Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn, the Executive’s Guide to Twitter & Blogging and the Executive’s Guide to Facebook, beta-launched the Executive’s Guide to Social Networks today to provide social media managers and individual executives a powerful new resource for practical insights into social business, which uses social technologies to transform business processes.

From its inception in 2008, the Executive’s Guide offered leaders a value proposition that is still unique in the market today. The guides help executives boost their individual competitiveness using social networks while they also address how to use social networking platforms to change business.

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