Social media

(I wrote this post with Diamond CTO Chris Curran) Are you taking no more than a squirt gun to the talent wars? Most people find jobs through social connections. In 1974, Harvard sociologist Mark Granovetter published his landmark study that showed four out of five people find jobs through personal connections. Yet, in our recent […]

As a matter of policy, we don’t review our own books, but we hope you will. Keep an eye out for the following Press titles in September, and let us know what you think of them in the comments. Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business by Josh Bernoff and Ted […]

I'm in Toronto this week on business. Arriving a few days early to play tourist, I tweeted for recommendations for places to eat and things to do. In...

Turning shared updates into a social media powerhouse

How to measure the effectiveness of community management.

Picture this: a nutrition scientist does a study with one person, limiting him to a 1500 calorie diet and having him run for 15 minutes on a treadmill each day. The man loses three pounds in a month. Can we safely assume that this experiment, when repeated with others, will produce the exact same result? […]

If you were going to design the perfect distraction, you’d probably make it irresistibly urgent, gossipy, and/or funny. You’d design it to be able to reach you any way possible, whether by e-mail, web site, or smart phone. You’d have it come from a trusted voice that you want to hear from, like a friend […]

Yes, you need quality. But you also need quantity.

Three resolutions that swim against the mass-connectivity tide.

On-demand services to try.

And why your company can’t ignore it.

Last year it was the staycation. This year it’s the digital fast. “How I unplugged” — from Twitter, from a Blackberry, from the Internet, or at the behest of the New York Times — is the new “what I did on my summer vacation.” As people trade stories about how they survived, or even thrived, […]

A couple of posts back I argued that social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) should remain social and not be co-opted for business purposes....

Strategies for navigating a new kind of communication landscape: the "echoverse."

Consumers today connect with brands in fundamentally new ways, often through media channels that are beyond manufacturers' and retailers' control. That...

The best stay attuned to their customers’ signals in the social graph.

The acquisition will only work if Yahoo listens more intently to its new users.

The right apps and tools to meet your goals.

New research reveals the power and limits of “influencers”

Are crises predictable? That’s what most economists are thinking about these days. The great Hyman Minsky spent a lifetime building a model of macroeconomic crisis, striving to do exactly that. I spent an afternoon building, presented for you here, a tiny model of microeconomic crises: how industries crash and collapse. Our subject? Why media just […]