Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have looked at business blogs for some time. In 2010 50% of the Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008.p Now in 2011, the use of blogging dropped to 37%. In contrast, they found, in a related study that blogs continued at the same 23% level in Fortune 500 companies. This has, in part, happen because of the rise of other social media that have taken over some of the function so blogs. However, blog remain the main vehicle if saying something of substance and most of the traditional media outlets have adopted them.

So it was interesting to me to go back in time to when ... Read the article

“Sometime reality is too complex. Fiction gives it form.” Jean Luc Godard

Sitting on a Greek island, I am reminded of how historically, stories have played a key role in transferring knowledge; the epic poems and ancient parables are evidence of this ageless capability. Before text was invented, stories were the main form of knowledge recording and sharing, as the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic (Havelock, 1976). Stories are still easier to remember than prose and any good speaker uses them to this advantage.

Research into great leaders suggests that a leader who truly enables change is one who creates a story; a vision that significantly affects... Read the article

In the small Greek town I am living in this month, there is a central square, like many other such squares in many other villages in Greece and elsewhere. Here is where knowledge has been exchanged for some time and continues to be shared. pSome of this is obtained by simple observation as I see differences many days just passing through it.

When we create social business applications I think it is best to build on existing patterns of knowledge exchange and then simply adding an electronic facilitation can be one way to address these cultural challenges. Let me provide two examples.

The first example, in this case from another ... Read the article

The quest for uncovering internal knowledge within an organization has been around for a very long time and was one of the early goals of knowledge management. Hind Benbya and Marshall Van Alstyne address this issue again through their MIT Sloan article, How to Find Answers Within Your Company. As they write, the challenge of locating internal knowledge on a specialized topic exists in any large organization. The larger and more segmented the company, the harder it gets to match people to problems. They go on to quite Lewis Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, “If only HP knew... Read the article

Web content management has way gone beyond the Web 1.0 role of publishing Web pages. My friend Geoff Bock recently wrote an interesting post, Web content management's new role: Fueling digitally driven businesses, that address ways to move your use of Web content management into this century. As he writes, “To compete in the digital economy, we actually need touse content to power useful applications for the enterprise. These are Web apps with a business purpose: They are designed to produce insights for decision-making and to deliver results.”

Geoff writes that we need to get more granular and away from a page orientation. I agree and it seems to be that increasing page views should no longer be the goal but rather increasing the number of actions you can do in a... Read the article

The New York Times recently had an extensive article on The Age of Big Data by Steve Lohr. Data is now growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years according to IDC. This has created a big demand in the job market. According to McKinsey the, “United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.”

The World Economic Forum at Davos, issued a report, “Big Data, Big Impact,” that “declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.” The report summary notes that a... Read the article

This is a term that Dave Weinberger used in his KM World article, Letting data out of its box, that my friend, Geoff Bock, pointed out to me.  Dave is talking about open data, which is data that has metadata that is open to link to other data. Then interesting things can happen, As Dave writes, “Once you let data out of its box—out of its cell—it immediately links up with everything it can, because that's how meaning works: One thing leads to another, and if it doesn't, it's non-sense.”

He adds that open data has value because of its links, “and links—the frisky little devils—just want to go forth and multiply.” Dave was writing these... Read the article

Brian Solis recently posted on the results from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2011 survey. This survey is something I have followed for a while. Here are some thoughts on the State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006. Brian begins with a thought I completely agree with as he puts blogs at the top of the social media list. Bloggers were the pioneers in this space and blogs still offer the best to offer a complete thought. Here is a 2009 post I did on Why You Should keep Blogging in the Age of Twitter. As Brian writes, “Over the years, blogs have formed the foundation of social media, democratizing the ability to publish thoughtful commentary, build a noteworthy community and equalize influence along the way.”

Twitter offers the sound bytes and blogs can go into... Read the article

I recently commented on some less intelligence social media marketing techniques by brands, picking up on a great post by Sameer Patel, Marketing your Marketing. Basically he was arguing against the rising practice of enticing your visitors to ‘Like’ your Facebook business page by throwing them a discount coupon and commented, “what were they thinking?”

Now Jeremiah Owyang comments on The Peculiar Marketing Trends Among The Social Software Industry. I can summarize my reaction by quoting Sameer, “what were they thinking?” as I see a similar logic in operation. Three are very old school and one is new school. First, some firms are putting up... Read the article

Yesterday, I reviewed Rawn Shah’s book, Social Networking for Business.  Today I am going to comment on his interview With Don Tapscott: The Industrial Age Has Finally Run Out of Gas. pI reminded of the TV commercial where everything runs on gas, even the dentist drill. It asked what if everything ran cleanly on the grid?  Don is quoted as saying, “Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.”

I hope he is right. But then a... Read the article