[Updated] CSRA 11th Year Celebration

11 Celebration summarizes my reflections on CSRA’s first decade in business, and my vision for our next decade. We’ve been pioneering in experiential social media and social business transformation since I founded the firm in February 2006.

It’s difficult to encapsulate ten years of learnings, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying! This page will reprise some of my favorite posts, and it will feature a series of videos I’ve made in which I explain where we’ve been and where we’re going. This post will change frequently, so please consider it a work in progress.

11 Celebration Videos

Video has the unique ability to communicate across the verbal–nonverbal spectrum, so I’m making numerous videos to share insights and highlights of CSRA’s first ten years in business. These have their own YouTube playlist.

Follow me or CSRA on LinkedIn to get real-time updates. Or CSRA on Twitter.

Live Now

1. Kicking off the series is 11Celebration Introduction => Why I founded CSRA, what our mission is, and where we’re going.
2. What customer experience really means => Why customer experience often underperforms, and how to fix it.
3. The surprising way to raise employee engagement  => Most employee engagement programs are brand-focused, not human-focused, so they fail to reach their potential. This is easier to change than most people think.
4. Customer success pitfalls and how to avoid them => Firms that ground their customer success programs in a true customer-first ethos outperform.
5. CSRA lessons learned reveals three powerful lessons I’ve learned from a decade of practicing experiential social media.
6. How CSRA builds trust at scale => My attempt at explaining a complex topic in a few minutes.
7. CSRA milestones => Memorable moments of our first decade in business, within the context of the volatile business cycle.
8. Healing business explains how I think business is wounded from a human point of view—and how I’m healing businesses.
9. Drive to Trust is CSRA’s major initiative to share trust building across diverse industries.

In Development

• The Trust Business Chain Reaction => Learn how trust monetizes

Pivotal Posts

I’ve been publishing on the Internet since 1994 and analog since the 80s, but these posts are foundational for CSRA’s mission today. I’ve arranged them in reverse chronological order (so the historical posts are at the bottom ;^).

• How Do You Feel? On Human Experience (October 2016)
• On Autonomy, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (March 2016)
• The Trust Business Chain Reaction: How Trust Monetizes (March 2016)
• Experiential Social Media and Business Intimacy (May 2014)
• Digital Transformation’s Personal Issue: It’s the Key to Customer Experience (September 2013)
• How Social Networks Change Strategy, Prediction and Decision-Making (December 2012)
• Knowledge Economy Products and The Future of Manufacturing (November 2012)
• Customer Service Is the New Marketing (February 2012)
• 2010 Reflections on the Global Economy: Have We Tilted? (January 2011)
• Decade in Review, 2000-2009 (January 2010)
• Book Review/Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (December 2009)
• Alumni 2.0: Employer-Employee Realignment (January 2009)
• Geography 3.0, What It Is and What It Means (April 2008)
• The Unofficial LinkedIn User’s Guide for Executives and Professionals (March 2007)
• Consumer Empowerment and Disruption (December 2006)
• The Knowledge Economy: The Ultimate Context for Understanding the Future (November 2006)
• Marketing Rosetta Stone Revealed at BIGfrontier (June 2006)

CSRA’s Second Decade

My personal mission is to increase the amount of trust in the world, so CSRA will be explicitly focused on guiding commercial, government and nonprofit firms’ discovery of the power of trust. Drive to Trust is our first initiative, and I’ve designed it to be a super-easy way for several firms to try experiential and compare results with their traditional social media and marketing. I’m recruiting its first cohort now.

I’m also very excited because our second ten years will be focused more on doing experiential rather than strategy. Most of my work in the first decade was strategy, which creates amazing value for clients since it enables much more effective execution, but I’ve noticed that strategy is all parts of the economy has shrunk to a fraction of its former self, and it isn’t returning; the world moves too fast for detailed plans. So CSRA encourages minimum viable strategy and focuses more on partnering with clients on pilot and scaling engagements.

This means I’ll be building more engagement teams comprised of team members from clients and CSRA’s. I’ve launched a new experiential apprenticeship to scale CSRA’s teams. I love mentoring and seeing people discover the magic of trust, connection, business and profit.

CSRA will be known as a pioneer in showing trusted firms are more profitable than “normal” firms, whose trust level stands at historical lows. I’ve been using metrics that quantify trust and outcomes for years, so we’ll have case studies that prove quantitatively trust’s impact on profit. Drive to Trust is the first step.