Chris Boudreaux helps large organizations develop and implement social media strategies and capabilities, including governance, measurement and operations.

His new book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, shows you how to transform teams, empower employees, integrate partners and mobilize customers to beat the competition in digital and social media. Buy the book on Amazon.

Nearly every social media tool and research report has a chart showing brand mentions, by venue, and they almost always show Twitter as the venue with the highest volume. This is useless data.

Why? Twitter’s short post length make it the venue with the most posts in almost every category on the Internet. The only way a chart like this has any value is if it shows twitter NOT holding the most posts for a category. THAT would be interesting.

Anyone who publishes a chart like this is just going through the motions, and needs to kick it up a notch.

Chris Boudreaux helps large organizations develop and implement social media strategies and capabilities, including governance, measurement and operations.

His new book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, shows you how to transform teams, empower employees, integrate partners and mobilize customers to beat the competition in digital and social media. Buy the book on Amazon.

I believe this is true for strategists and entrepreneurs, as well as creatives:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that ... Read More »

Facebook today announced a new feature that lets users search for information from or about the people or organizations in their network -- or, in their social graph. I see two big implications:

Eloqua recently published very interesting data, showing that gamification significantly increased engagement in their online customer community (chart below).

These are the best quotes from customers, partners and employees at JiveWorld in Las Vegas, updated throughout the conference, which occurred in October 2012.

These are the most compelling and informative quotes from the Spredfast Summit, in Austin, TX, 2012.

I see a lot of product demo's. A lot. And I never understand why product or sales teams begin their product demo with a series of slides explaining the problem, instead of starting with the product. Here are some tips that can help you improve the effectiveness of your next product demo.

These are the most compelling quotes from the Twitter stream around Dreamforce 2012 (Sep 18 - 20, 2012).

The team at Convince and Convert wrote today about the widespread problem of plagiarism in social media, and the problem will only continue to worsen as more people produce more content on the public web. Here are three strategies you can take, to ensure you get the returns that you deserve for your original content work.

In 2009, Gartner reported that 70% of social business programs fail. Some folks seemed surprised. But, let's take a look at the range of failure rates reported for CRM projects over the years.

Many organizations deploy an expertise locator tool within their social business program, but few employees use them because (1) the benefits do not outweigh the work of maintaining a profile, and (2) self-maintained expertise profiles are usually inflated and inaccurate. Therefore, people rely on personal networks within their organization to know who to call when they need something. That is now changing.

According to Google and Compete, 2012 will be the first year that apparel sales are more influenced by online channels that offline. This infographic shows details of the impact on how consumers shop for apparel.

More and more brands are realizing the benefits of enabling their employees in social media, so software vendors and IT departments are responding by adding features and functionality. In recent years, a few B2B tech companies enabled their employees with basic training and permission to engage, and a more sophisticated and transformational approach to enablement is coming over the next 2-3 years. (P.S. That is the focus of my book with Susan Emerick.) In anticipation of this trend, a new class of software is emerging, specifically aimed at enabling employees in social media, at scale. The chart below shows the four types of solutions that are being applied in this emerging space:

Social media and cloud computing are both helping brands accelerate their time-to-market for new offerings, services and support capabilities. While they work together, they are different, and it can help business leaders to think about how -- especially when planning long-term investments in the two:

For all the folks selling social business, who think that they will sway business leaders by beating a drum to the tune of "The World is Changing and You Must Change With It", I offer the following two quotes from the 2003 book Reengineering the Corporation, by Michael Hammer:

Thanks to Sue Bess for sharing this timeline of social CRM acquisitions at Oracle and Salesforce, as the tech giants enter the space with full force:

As I write an upcoming book with Susan Emerick, on the topic of enabling large numbers of employees in social media, we continually meet people with a vision for change, who need help in developing their ability to lead the change -- to tirelessly communicate their vision, and to simply get everyone on board. In the mean time, we will begin peppering little nuggets like this one from Ken Burns, to help us all build the skill that we need, but have so little time to develop.

A lot of people think that a brand must own all aspects of social media listening. People fear that outsourcing even a part of the engagement process (i.e., listening) would take away the authenticity which is supposed to be the pixie dust of social media. People wonder how they would build an authentic, direct relationship with customers or stakeholders if they outsource some of the process. While relationship-building can not be outsourced, we should ask ourselves which parts of the social media engagement process really do build the relationship. Here's a hint: listening is not the critical part that you have to execute with internal employees, and this post explains why.

With players stitching hashtags and twitter handles onto their shoes, the Premier League in the UK has published social media guidelines for the players.