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Recent Posts
- Reflecting on 2012 and looking forward to the year ahead
- Facebook’s inability to stay focused and be original
- Achieving exponential user growth: Marketing in the new age
- Twitter’s walls are going up! And soon.
- Technology Trends and Disruptions in 2012
- The Social Enterprise is here in full force! Profiling 3 Toronto startups in the space
- Reminder on why Business Blogging is essential
- The iPad2 and my Top 5 native iPad apps
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Category Archives: Social
Facebook’s inability to stay focused and be original
As the Randi Zuckerberg story continues to blow up on the interwebs, I suddenly realized that in fact the bigger story lay in that Facebook was about the release a massive feature/ app called Poke. I say massive – because … 
Posted in Media, Social, Startups
Tagged facebook, mark zuckerberg, poke, randi zuckerberg, snapchat, social software, startup
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Twitter’s walls are going up! And soon.
I was perplexed earlier this month when my tweets wouldn’t post to my LinkedIn profile. Sure I had changed my settings to post only those tweets with the hashtag #in, but that should’nt have caused any issues. Upon repeated attempts …
Posted in Media, Social
Tagged facebook, flipboard, linkedin, revenue, tweets, twitter, walled garden
3 Comments
Technology Trends and Disruptions in 2012
In this video blog post I talk about technology trends and disruptions I see coming in 2012. Some key themes include — enterprise software making a comeback, how there is a true globalization of startups and VC money, how social is changing for the better and lastly how reading and education are being disrupted.
Whats funny though is that I recorded this video over the weekend and Apple’s iBooks 2.0 and iTunes University announcements came out on Jan 19th (yesterday) and focused exactly on the last point I make — about education, learning and reading needing to be disrupted.
In any case, you must watch the recorded live stream of the Apple educational event if you haven’t already. Do it for your kids if not for yourself, because it will be their new reality very soon.
In a nutshell, Apple is first in line (and likely soon to become the leader) to completely changing the face of education by allowing students to access textbooks on their iPad, textbooks that are a lot more fun, interactive and engaging. And probably more impactful, by partnerning up with more schools than ever to release even more free classes on iTunes University from leading educational institutes like Stanford, Harvard, MIT etc. These free classes while intended for students and teachers in those schools and programs, can also be accesses for free by anybody with an iTunes account.
Almost unbelievable. I mean who wouldn’t want to take a 2 hour class at Stanford, for FREE, while sitting in their living room, right?
Posted in Funding, Innovation, Media, Social, Startups
Tagged apple, deal flow, dealflow, disrupt, education, enterprise software, iBooks, iTunes U, learning, pay it forward, reading, social media, startups, technology, trends, venture capital
3 Comments
The Social Enterprise is here in full force! Profiling 3 Toronto startups in the space
Weaving a social context into your business is quickly becoming a prerequisite for success.
Fortune 500 companies are already investing in what is now known as the ‘Social Enterprise’, wherein employees easily collaborate with one another and use social media to connect with partners and customers like never before.
The Social Enterprise promises to connect companies with their customers and employees in a whole new way. In this post, I talk about what it means for a business to be social.
I also profile three Toronto startups – Viafoura, realSociable and Rypple – that are shaping the Social Enterprise pie, one slice at a time.
There are many aspects of a business that social enterprise technology can serve, and numerous software companies have emerged in the last few years to solve these problems.
Salesforce.com, one of the front-runners in bringing Social Enterprise technology to its clients, believes that:
85% of companies use social media to engage customers
64% of users are more likely to purchase from a company that helps them via social media
27% of companies active in social media report higher profit margins
Posted in Profiles, Social, Startups
Tagged founders, innovation, social enterprise, startups, Toronto
6 Comments
Google Pluses and Minuses – What Works & What’s Missing with Google+
Google’s latest offering in the social networking arena – Google Plus (Google+) has now been out for over a month. Google Plus has already surpassed 25 million registered users. To put this in perspective, know that Facebook took 3 years to reach this goal!
Google’s failure to effectively launch Google Buzz and Google Wave a few years ago, made this new foray into social networking seem like a monumental task, but it looks like this is one of their best efforts yet. The company may have finally figured out how to do social well, their key mantra being: you don’t have to share your content with everyone. Instead they expect content to be targetted to specific contacts and groups of people.
Below are my thoughts on some of the less obvious features that are awesome and some comments on what might be missing:
Posted in Innovation, Media, Product, Social, UX/ UI
Tagged apple, comscore, facebook, google, kevin rose, privacy, social media, social networking
5 Comments
Karma Behaviorism: Does It Pay Off?
The @Jonathanscard story is taking the world by storm. TechCrunch, the Globe&Mail etc have already written about it. (Yeah I know what you’re thinking – even credible “news” sites are nothing more than link grabbers these days).
Anyhow, I myself tried it today to see if it works. And it did!
I walked over to a Starbucks this afternoon and ordered a $3.23 grande ice-tea lemonade – and quelle surprise – a quick scan of the photo image of the loaded Starbucks card on my phone, rang the order through! The cashier was pretty impressed by my “tech skills” too. Poor guy had no idea it was simply a photo image of the barcoded back of the Starbucks card 
In any case, of course I was happy to get my poison of choice, free of charge to me. But the question remains: is JonathansCard a thoughtful gesture/ social experiment or a genius marketing campaign?
Posted in Marketing, Product, Social
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Why Social Media Is Not Working For You: A Wake-up Call
Often businesses get overwhelmed by the hype around social media and jump right into it to avoid getting left behind. This tends to lead to a circumstance where a company expects to start seeing traction, but end up only burning rubber – simply because they haven’t thought things through properly.
They then tend look for issues with their quality of content or frequency of posting (which do contribute to take up in some capacity) without really looking at the big picture of why progress hasn’t been made.
Below are some common reasons why social media may not be working for your organization (apart from the fact that you sound like a corporate robot and not a real person):
Posted in Corporate Culture, Marketing, Media, Social
Tagged community, marketing, Marketing ROI, social media
2 Comments
Using Facebook Comments For Your Business or Blog
I want to open with the fact that TechCrunch’s decision to use Facebook for comments is both short-sighted and paranoiac on their part.
I can certainly see the appeal of using Facebook comments – I think that given the number of people that are on Facebook as well as the number of people that use Facebook as their digital/ online identity – certainly makes a case for inclusion. However a decision to move exclusively to Facebook comments and Yahoo is extremely limiting.
In a nutshell, Facebook Comments does not solve the problem of anonymity.
Posted in Marketing, Media, Social
10 Comments