In an article I wrote last year titled “Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM and Less Like Apple”, I compared the cultures of both companies and how over the past 25 years they had flipped: “Today’s Big Blue is the antithesis of Big Brother. It’s ‘Big Open’. A transparent, nimble, collaborative organization known more for listening and engaging customers than for dictating to them. While ironically, some say Apple now resembles Big Brother given their propensity for tight controls.”

Recently I've found myself reading a number of articles and blog posts decrying the untimely demise of the social business movement. So what do you think, has social for business run its course and now we should just move on, because there's "nothing to see here"? Have businesses given it a good go and, finding no value, are they abandoning their efforts? Okay, right up front here, let me say clearly, social for business is not only not dead, it's thriving and delivering lots of value to businesses! In fact, I believe that the changes associated with social business are absolutely critical for businesses in the information age if they want to attract and retain the best employees and partners and if they want to meet the expectations of their customers. In our last social business survey conducted Summer 2012, we found that 67% of North American businesses were already using some social tools for business, up from 42% the prior year. So if that's true, why all the doom and gloom predictions?

If you have been following my series, 10 Easy Steps to Social Business, so far then hopefully you’ve gained an understanding of:

1. Embedding social techniques into your business processes with some examples (more to come).
2. The need for customization of your social business solution.
3. Things to think about when preparing a Social Business Governance Plan.

Many thanks for the kind feedback and comments I’ve received so far.  Steps 4 – 6 of the plan will be coming soon.  In the meantime let me keep you busy with my infographic which summarizes the first three steps:

Summary of the first three steps

On October 25 in New York City I will run a workshop on Crowdsourcing for Marketing in Enterprise  Agencies as part of the global Crowdsourcing Week workshop series. The following day I will run a workshop that is highly complementary, on Crowdsourcing for Media and Content.

Following on from the broad-based first edition of Getting Results From Crowds, one of the most important topics I have been delving into is the application of crowdsourcing to marketing. The New York workshop will go into the topic in detail, including the primary applications, extensive case studies, industry perspectives, analysis of crowdsourced marketing platforms, approaches to building your own crowds, effective strategies for creative agencies to tap the rise of crowdsourcing, and more.

Just as the field of crowdsourcing is far broader than most people appreciate (with 22 categories in our Crowdsourcing Landscape), there are many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied to marketing.

There are 7 major applications of crowdsourcing to marketing:

Do you work in an organization that is slow to adapt? Do you feel constrained by inept IT and HR policies? Are there deep impenetrable departmental silos within a non-collaborative culture? Is innovation and change painfully slow? If you answered yes to any of these, what can you really do from the inside?

Cartoon by Hugh Macleod @gapingvoid

I am often asked how to support social collaboration in the workplace. As I showed in my recent blog post, there are some big differences between learning in an e-business and learning in a social/collaborative business.

So it is not just about adding new social approaches or social media into the training “blend”, supporting social collaboration is underpinned not only by new technologies but by a new mindset.  In other words, it means ..

1 – moving from a focus on organising and managing training (which includes e-learning and blended learning) FOR others, to helping  individuals and teams address their OWN performance problems.

2 – recognising that most learning already happens in the workplace – informally and socially – as people connect and work with one another – as well as outside the organisation in their professional networks. It means...

You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process.

Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help...

In my recent webinar presentation for the LSG online conference, Using a collaboration platform for brilliant learning, rather than giving a PowerPoint presentation, I took the participants on aweb tour of the Social Learning Centre.  And, in doing so, I demonstrated how:

1. Workplace learning is not  just about training – but about supporting learning across the Social Workplace Learning Continuum –  and involves both organising structured learning experiences as well as supporting informal learning.
2. Workplace learning is not (just) about creating content (aka courses), dumping them into a LMS and then just monitoring usage – but is...