Photo cred: Peter Lam

I’ve been holding on to this post for a few weeks now. I had planned to publish this in the first week of Jan, but decided not to, as at the time it just didn’t feel like the right forum. Plus, I didn’t think anybody would care.

But things have changed now. I’ve come to realize that we’re all human, and while there is an expectation from many, even ourselves, to be perfect at all times “public facing”, those who truly win — are those who embrace who they are. They are the ones who are themselves all the time.

And perhaps this is all common knowledge. But it wasn’t to me. I’ve stumbled upon this the hard way. But now that I’m here, I figured, alright time to bare all. So. With nothing to hide, here goes…

Looking back on this year I have much to be proud of and to be grateful for, for it has been a bountiful year.

♣ The firm I work for grew by 30% this year and I feel very good to have contributed to its success. This year alone my team and I launched a new brand, figured out our corporate positioning, updated our product messaging, came up with a fantastic new website, doubled our presence in the media, and made big strides in optimizing our product marketing tactics. It’s been a privilege to work with the talented team at PriceMetrix and although it has been a long road, I know 2013 is going to be bigger and better. Penetrating an adjacent but altogether new market is on the agenda this year (yay!). The exact type of thing I like to work on.

♣ I am also thankful that after over a year of filming, my husband’s movie wrapped shooting this December. We were mildly surprised and oh-so-grateful to have such wonderful friends and friends-of-friends, many of whom came out in hoards to help us with locations, sound, casting, web development and of course moral support.

When you take on the ginormous task of independent filmmaking, you know it is going to be a life-changer. But little did we know that it was literally going to change our life by bringing us closer to many of our friends, family and acquaintances. Some of these amazing people have gone above and beyond our asks and expectations, and for that I want to personally thank each one of them. You know who you are. ♥

Now that we’re in 2013, our goal is to turn this life-changer into a game-changer. We want to show the world (especially Hollywood) that independent film-making on a less than $100,000 dollar budget is not only possible, but equally likely to be embraced by its intended audience without compromising production value.

Photo cred: Rishi Shankardass

The market is ready for something new, the internet is working to our advantage, and disruption is all around us. 

The timing is right. I can feel it in my bones! And I hope that many of you, especially those of you who like thriller/crime/dramas, will offer your ideas, feedback and support to us when the time comes. If you or someone you know might like to be involved in the post-production phase of this film, please drop me a line. We’re always looking to collaborate with bright, talented people.

Once the trailer and website are out (next month), I will be putting my marketing chops to good use! (I’m excited to see how well my skills will transfer from tech-world into film-dom. I pray the universe cuts me some slack.)

♣ Amidst all this filming and intensely busy work schedule, I also had the luxury and pleasure of travelling to some new places this year, notably Iceland, Aruba and Jamaica.

Photo cred: @AmritaMathur on Instagram

Travel has become increasingly important to me. When I was younger, I used to travel because I feared that I might miss out once I’m older. Today, I have slowly transitioned to travelling in order to keep me from trying to control all the little details in my life. I  travel to let go. Life is beautiful, delightful and unexpected and each moment is truly a gift . I never want to take what I have for granted.

So I hope for myself and for all you travellers out there — may wanderlust never leave your side, it is a glorious thing.

♣ This year has also been interesting because I’ve fortuitously bumped into and worked with many talented individuals, some of whom are running some very interesting startups. I would like to cover some of them in greater detail in a future post (once they’re ready to release publicly). In particular, I want to give a special kudos and high-fives to the founders at Quandl and thank them for letting me be a part of their world. They are trying to democratize data in the true sense, and disrupt a billion dollar industry — a huge challenge, but their IP is equipped to tackle it.

More on them in a future post. Plus, if anybody reading this is going to StartupFest’s Elevator Tour in Toronto this January, just holla. I’ll be there, and I’d love to sync up and understand a bit about your technology, market and potentially cover you on techkik!

♣ From the outside my life can sometimes appear a little crazy. I have typically kept very busy, and I know I have a tendency to take on a lot. But one of the things I appreciate about 2013 already is that life has been getting less hectic overall. Some of this is due to self-realization that I cant ‘do everything’, but also because I am finally at a point in my life where I can spend time doing what I love — reading voraciously, learning new skills, exploring new music and film, helping young companies grow and scale, and taking charge of my health.

My focus this year will be on streamlining and building self-awareness. All the successful people I have ever met, whether in business, entertainment or sports, have all had similar stories about facing challenges: they have subjected themselves to merciless self-examination, and essentially reinvented the methods by which they were going to achieve their dreams and goals.

Photo cred: Rishi Shankardass, Trish Feil

With so many new challenges ahead of me, I intend to question every aspect of the approach I use, my methods, biases and deeply held assumptions. I am going to take the time to “think” and not just “do”. I am going to be more strategic in picking what I do “do”. And I am going to take care of myself.

If you have any realizations to share, please do so in comments.

To beets, ginger and self-love.

Amrita

Not only is Poke a copy of an App called Snapchat (Rated 12+ and supposedly popular with teenagers), but according to the Facebook PR engine – they were able to develop it in all of 12 days.

Ok. I guess that’s impressive. But wait, I have so many questions!

1. Is Facebook now officially in the business of copying, duplicating, replicating apps and products that have traction and overlap with their audience? And if yes, why are they blabbing about something they copied? I mean, its never cool to steal a tiny startup’s product… let alone vehemently show the market that they are not afraid to either overpay or copy innovation simply because they can. (Although, many including Ben Parr think that startups needn’t be afraid).

2. Next, why is Facebook spending time and energy on a ‘sexting’ app? Sure, its not just for sexting, and yes, there are probably many clever uses for a self-destruct picture message, but knowing Facebook, Poke will be the same if not more intrusive (and riddled with privacy and probably legal issues), as its other apps and features. In any case, shouldn’t Facebook be concentrating on more important things like generating revenue?

3. I guess its possible that Facebook has strategically decided to build this app and use it as a clever way to further entrench themselves into our lives, and specifically focus on youth because they are the most active and make up much of the power-user base. But then why make that your focus and invent something original instead? Somehow this feels very faddish to me and I really don’t understand why Facebook continues to invest in apps especially with the already growing failure of their app platform? If at all Facebook is still trying to create a ‘social operating system’ (which obviously hasn’t happened after repeated attempts), then as a shareholder I’d be pissed, because frankly, they first ought to figure out how to better monetize their traffic.

4. Also, whos idea was this anyway? Did Zuck walk into a room full of developers and go “alright, we’re copying 3 ideas this week – best one wins”?! And how do developers feel about this? At the end of the day, is this what they’d want their legacy to be? Hey, if I had mad coding skills and worked for a giant technology corporation that had the ability to change the world, I’d rather build something that made history… like things that Google or Apple put out. No offense developer friends, but I know many of you are at Facebook because you want to build something awesome, and not something faddy that was almost wholely copied.

5. And lastly, and perhaps the only question that really matters to users – what the heck is wrong with you Facebook? Why cant you build a quality social platform where users are not forced to recreate their friend list, when users have control over their pages, page views and impressions, and where users are not slaves to your ever changing privacy policies? Why Facebook, why? Why not let quality and integrity trump everything else?

Give us control, be transparent and charge us fairly, and I promise you’ll see a revival of faith and support. Until then, good luck, because you’re on a very slippery slope.

While I disagree with some parts of his post (they have to be an engineer for example/coder/hacker), there are a few portions that are absolute GOLD. Here are a few excerpts:

 “The process of integrating and optimizing your product to a big platform requires a blurring of lines between marketing, product, and engineering, so that they work together to make the product market itself. Projects like email deliverability, page-load times, and Facebook sign-in are no longer technical or design decisions – instead they are offensive weapons to win in the market.”

“The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs. Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric.”

 “The role of the VP of Marketing, long thought to be a non-technical role, is rapidly fading and in its place, a new breed of marketer/coder hybrids have emerged.”

“…two identical products can have 100X different outcomes, just based on how well they integrate into Craigslist/Twitter/Facebook. It’s an amazing time, and a new breed of creative, technical marketers are emerging.”

Here are my takeaways from his full essay and case-study on AirBnB:

#1: Marketing in the new age a.k.a “growth hacking” is the real deal. If you are a senior marketing leader at a startup at any stage, your sole job should be user growth. After all, in the startup world, and almost any young company, the company needs to ‘grow’. In fact, for a ‘VP of Marketing’ role, the job description should simply state ‘grow users’ or ‘grow subscriptions’ or ‘sustain growth’. This doesn’t necessarily mean the same as ‘grow revenue’… generating money is a whole different ball game, and that’s where the user growth, community etc can help; but growing revenue is the function of whoever owns and determines the business model.

#2: The second big take away – which we all subconsciously know and acknowledge, but don’t always admit – is that good marketing happens when the product itself has virality built in. (I will talk about why we don’t admit this later in the post). Andrew uses the example of how AirBnB built functions like ‘post to Craigslist’ in order to tap into this unique channel with millions of users. I say unique because i) Craigslist has no open API. Like at all. So obviously AirBnB has to hack it to integrate with it somehow. ii) No one had used Craigslist in the way that AirBnB leveraged it. So they were the automatically first-to-market with this channel, and utilizing the way they did, gave it a lot more uniqueness since they were the first to do it.

Now, this was the unique integration that was key in helping AirBnB go-to-market in scale. It wasn’t traditional marketing, but the reverse-engineered pseudo-API that AirBnB built that contributed to their rapid user growth.

So the question becomes – whose job is it to think about stuff like that? Is it the Product team? Is it the Dev team? Marketing? Who?!

Andrew Chen makes the case that this already is to some degree and always should be under the purview of Marketing. While many would disagree, I do think that Marketing should be closely working with the product management, design and engineering teams, and be actively looking for ways to do exactly this sort of thing by providing input in the early stages of product strategy. User growth these days is intrinsically linked to getting this right.

What I don’t believe however is that this marketing leader has to be an engineer or coder or hacker as Andrew suggest. Any technical marketer or marketing technologist as I used to call myself, knows where they can add value and how.

 Here is how I see this working:

1. Hopefully you have a senior marketing person (perhaps it is one of the founders) that is business minded and knows the marketing fundamentals, but is also equipped with a good understanding of emerging technology and/or has a technical or engineering background.
2. This person doesn’t have to be a coder, but should be able to speak with engineering teams, have their trust, as well as the ability to brainstorm with them.
3. They must be involved with and touch all aspects of product development and its evolution (even though the product is not owned by them), and be fully in tune with the feature set being developed and iterated on. While Marketing is traditionally seen as talking to the market, and product management is listening to the market; the new incarnation of Marketing dictates that the VP of Marketing also drive the right features and integrations to be developed, in order to grow users. This is especially important in the early-stages of the startup lifecycle, and can slowly devolve once the company has reached maturity.
4. The VP of Marketing must know what channels to leverage and how to effectively utilize them in order to reach the maximum audience. In the case of the AirBnB and Craigslist integration, they did not need to know exactly how to make it work, but they should be able to ask the right questions or define the right parameters in order to get the same result. For example, in the case of Trip Advisor, they don’t stop at simple Facebook Connect integration. They go even deeper into the social graph and go well beyond the user’s immediate social circle. In a case like this, I imagine that someone in marketing said “we need to find a way to show our users reviews from their Facebook friends and friends of friends first, in order to achieve a more personalized and trust building experience”. A brainstorm would proceed with product + engineering to figure out effective techniques to tap into Facebook Open Graph. You get the idea
5. Successful marketing technologists understand the above, and more. They know that even though they might not know ‘how’, they can devise strategies, get buy in from the CEO/ Founder(s) and prompt action. They do this by testing their various hypotheses early on and refining them through trial and error. This is again especially important, but because most good marketers have good instincts, but great marketers are scientific enough and technical enough to actually test the crap out of their hunches.
6. Lastly, if and when a startup decides to hire staff in Sales, Business Development and Channel management roles, I believe they must almost always report into or have a dotted line into Marketing. I’ve personally always found it to be discomforting and strange when sales teams don’t report into marketing. Why is it ever the other way around? It makes no sense to me. In fact in India (where I’m from) and Europe, Sales almost always reports into marketing – whether that be a VP of Sales reporting into a CMO, or simply that the Marketing department is a more corporate and centralized function, with sales being more regional and invariably rolling up. Before I start to digress, my point is – Marketing is ultimately responsible for user growth, and Sales/ Biz Dev is a channel if you will, that aids in that process. Having a sales team can be a tactic, a strategy, a stopgap measure, a long-term thing or whatever… it doesn’t matter… sales is there to help marketing succeed in their mission. (Disclaimer: there are reasons for the opposite to be true in the case of B2E companies, but here we’re talking mostly about consumer startups).

To summarize, marketing as we know it has changed because the internet tactics which was once the territory of the elite few, are now open to all. The main difference between a marketer ad a growth hacker is that a GH is more technical and understands new technology and APIs much better, thereby allowing them to capitalize on markets and channels available for growth quickly and in a scalable manner. Understanding  APIs and insightful social data and tracking it closely is the only way to be successful today.

he difference Aaron and Andrew contend is that a growth hacker is more technical or understands new technology and APIs better. But if a marketing manager, director of VP works for a technology company, they should understand the market and channels available for growth AND constantly be looking for new markets and channels.

In order to achieve hockey stick user growth, the VP of Marketing has to be fully involved and almost co-own the product/solution/ service with the Founder/ VP of Product, and come at it in a way that expands the usage of their product. In fact, I would tell all startup founders to always give their senior Marketing leaders the title of ‘VP, Marketing and User Growth’. This would keep it top of mind not just for the marketing leader but for everyone at the startup, thereby achieving a level of respect, maybe even awe, which in the right amounts can be quite healthy for a young company trying to grow their user base.

Oh and, needless to say that whoever you’re hiring must really get their title. If they happen not to like it, then you are definitely not the right person for your startup. Worse, if they are still reading Memoirs of a Hi-Tech Hustler, then run fast and run far

This TechCrunch article on how Growth Hackers Changed Marketing has a lot of the same themes running through it (with better use of jargon and grammar), and is telling of an industry trend. But don’t get too caught up in terminology. Growth hacking, Marketing, Product Marketing etc, they’re all one and the same when you’re in ‘hustle’ mode.

Good luck my startup friends, I hope you can use some of this. Please share your thoughts on whats working for you!

Upon repeated attempts to unlink and relink my Twitter account to LinkedIn, I finally solicited help on LinkedIn’s support forum.

And lo and behold, in big words the help page finally stated:

“Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in all third-party applications. As of June 29, 2012, Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.”

Twitter had cut off LinkedIn! They were no longer partnering with LinkedIn to sync updates from one site to the other! The partnership that began in 2009 has briskly ended.

As if right on cue, I found Twitter’s official blog post that talked about the importance of delivering a consistent Twitter experience to their users and how they are “working hard building tools that make it easy for developers to build common Twitter features into their own sites in a simple and consistent way.”

Ok, so lets get this straight. Users will still be able to post updates on LinkedIn and broadcast those posts to Twitter, but content sharing won’t go the other way. But yet, Twitter is ok with tweets being cross-posted to Facebook? Well, in fairness, perhaps they plan to cut off Facebook too, and just haven’t done it yet. They are of course a much more powerful player in the realm of social media.

I dont believe it is a loss for LinkedIn. They still has their users and its ad-revenue is further protected. They also have other means of making money completely unrelated to ‘content’ which is primarily what Twitter was supplying.

Keeping their content stream all to themselves matches Twitters strategy of late. They are happy to have others post content into Twitter i.e. generate more content, but not to happy to have other platforms use their content elsewhere. This might be explained by the following:

Twitter like any other business wants to make money.

Their prized asset is content.

Content that is generated by its millions of users.

In order to properly monetize this content, Twitter needs to protect the content.

And what is the best way to protect your content? By allowing third parties to build into Twitter. This means that they want to become more of a Facebook style platform inside which developers can build applications.

Will they make exceptions? Suuuure. They will work along-side you, just as long as you allow Twitter to share in the ad revenue.

Frankly, the logic makes sense. If Twitter’s content i.e. tweets are flowing into Facebook, LinkedIn, Flipboard and the likes, and these sites are generating revenue based on usage/content etc — then why shouldn’t Twitter get a piece of the action? It is their content after all.

Does this mean Facebook agreed to revenue-sharing while LinkedIn did not? Could be. Or it could simply be the calm before the storm.

I think Twitter has seen and knows, that while their service is popular, many users merely use their platform as a portal to post content to and from elsewhere on the web.

Now with Twitter’s latest implementation, called Twitter Cards, users will be able to display headlines, bylines, photos and teaser blurbs for articles and other content around the web.

This is likely the first of many such features to come and why it has become so important for Twitter to protect their experience. Keeping people within the sphere of influence as long as possible, is key to Twitter’s revenue strategy!

The real question is – will users embrace the walls Twitter is building, or will they flee? Tell us in your comments.

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?

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

But before we get into that, I want you to check out a recent business journal by McKinsey and Company. Within, they broadly outline three types of Social Enterprises:

• Internally Networked organizations,
• Externally networking organizations, and
• Fully Networked Enterprises.

You can read the definitions as a pre-cursor to reading about the three startups profiled in this post, as well to make the realization that there is much room and time for the Social Enterprise industry to mature and expand.

Let me use Salesforce and Jive Software as examples to illustrate these broad categories better. If you know both companies and their latest acquisitions/ growth strategies, you will easily see that – Salesforce is currently in a state to provide services to become an Externally Networked organization, but they are speeding towards providing services for a Fully Networked Enterprise. While Jive Software is currently in my view, an Internally Networked organization also moving towards a Fully Networked Enterprise.

As the industry matures, we can anticipate several companies joining forces and/or getting acquired to perform the functions a fully networked enterprise would. Currently however – the pie is still large and very fragmented – which serves as a great opportunity for many startups to be a part of the puzzle.

First up we have Viafoura – a user engagement platform that is focused on helping digital publishers and media companies supercharge their audience interaction.

In a nutshell Viafoura helps their clients build communities around their brands and convert audiences from passive users to engaged contributors. At the moment, they are meeting the needs of large media enterprises with monthly page views of 10 million and upwards and quietly gearing up for release of v2 of their product.

I asked Jesse Moeinifar, Founder and CEO of Viafoura what he thought of the hot new metric – ‘engagement’ – and how he anticipated socially savvy companies to use it.

“Engagement has emerged as the most important measure of the health of a software product or digital media property.Digital publishers once relied solely on impressions and page views to take their pulse. In recent years, the shift has been towards engagement metrics such as interactions per visit, contributions per user and length of visit, in addition to page views. All tolled, these metrics are often called engagement, or sometimes depth of visit” says Jesse.

I immediately understood why Viafoura was in business. Media companies of all enterprises thrived on customer engagement and page views of course.

“We realize the importance of customer engagement for enterprises. In fact, engagement is Viafoura’s reason for existence. Digital publishers are masters when it comes to content production and distribution. However, user engagement is starting to be a field of study in itself and that’s where we come into the picture.”

I asked Jesse how exactly they help their clients increase user engagement.

“We offer tools and incentives to drive audience interactions, along with a powerful back-end to manage and grow that community. Viafoura is a complete user engagement platform for media enterprises that focuses on conversation, community and gamification.”

(Tip: they are in the process of on-boarding several new clients, some of which are amongst the largest media companies in the world.)

Viafoura and its fellow Ryerson DMZ startup realSociable see a transformation in full effect. While Viafoura’s clients want to capitalize on their consumer-facing opportunities in the social media space, realSociable’s opportunity is in providing a service to those companies that are looking to move beyond just media monitoring and into integrating social into their sales strategy.

Dalia Asterbadi, Founder and CEO of realSociable suggests that high-growth companies that have defined markets/ prospects, need to better leverage social intelligence to create a more productive and opportunistic sales force.

Her company realSociable compiles social insight and real-time analytics in one place, arming sales teams with a greater understanding of their client base along with a snapshot of their needs.

“Social enterprise is about managing a set of insights that lead to effective engagement and a material transaction,” says Asterbadi.  “It is the new paradigm of relationship selling.”

 I told her I agreed and that enterprises needed to better leverage all the publicly available information out there and contextualize it for their purposes, whatever that purpose may be.

“Exactly. In the case of sales – relationship is king. If you’re able to make your (sales) teams more proactive and collaborative, and empower them with rich real-time insight about their prospects, wouldn’t that make staying in touch be so much more impactful?” she says.

Ok, so you are taking engagement one step further by making it in context and real-time?

“Yes exactly. Real-time updates reap the best results. Engagement can be powerful, but it has to be at the right time in order to influence an action.  realSociable empowers the enterprise to react to pre-determined triggers, which in turn allows them to be immediately responsive and start meaningful conversations with prospects and customers. It allows them to get creative in their outreach tactics,” says Dalia Asterbadi.

Ok great, I am all for better engagement and responsiveness to customers and prospects in real-time. But who is doing the engaging? Is it not the employees of the enterprise?

What about employee engagement?

Bohdan Zabawskyj, CTO of Rypple thinks that is something enterprises need to pay more attention to. Rypple is in the business of ‘Social Performance Management’. They have turned their focus to serving what in their view is the biggest asset of any enterprise — its workforce.

“Establishing employee engagement and creating a motivational and sustainable culture is absolutely essential.  A culture of engagement fosters commitment, collaboration, and creativity, all of which are essential in today’s competitive environment,” says Bohdan.

We at Rypple believe transparent communication and continuous feedback aid this process.”

Another business journal by McKinsey shows that when people feel valued, they’re motivated to work better. So Rypple created a platform that allows for empowerment of people to achieve their goals, receive meaningful recognition and a way to exchanging real-time constructive feedback from their colleagues.

Rypple believes there are three main behaviors that employees need/crave: i) recognition of great work ii) fast feedback and iii) coaching/ mentorship as applicable, and that’s what their platform focuses on.

One thing that jumped out at me was how Rypple believed that recognition, especially socialized recognition would pave the way to having highly engaged teams and boosted performance.

I talked to Nick Stein, Director of Content & Media at Rypple, and asked him what he thought of employee engagement and what value they saw in socializing it.

“We have taken a just-in-time approach to (employee) performance.We believe making the performance process more social and collaborative can significantly boost performance and engagement.”

Ok sure, but isn’t that a lot of work? Doesn’t that put extra strain on the organization?

“Not at all. It’s not about creating new behavior. It’s about enhancing existing behavior. When employees and managers communicate more effectively with one another, they become more efficient. And that ultimately leads to better business performance.”

Alright, it was starting to make sense. But I was still skeptical. Wouldn’t Rypple only work for younger, nimbler companies with younger workforces? I just couldn’t see large stodgy enterprises embracing something like this, at least not yet.

While Nick acknowledged that younger companies run by the millennial generation are naturally more open to the idea of transparency and frequent feedback at work, Rypple’s more traditional customers also see the value and engagement that comes from a more open, social, and collaborative environment at work.

Painless and effective performance management is how he phrased it. In fact, I found this great infographic they did a few months ago that tells a good story about the feedback gap in performance evaluations.

I probed further about signing Facebook on as a customer, and how exactly they used the Rypple platform.

“Yes. Facebook’s  employees worldwide use Rypple to facilitate 1:1 coaching, continuous feedback, and recognition between their regular review cycles. They also use Rypple to run their semi-annual performance summaries,” confirmed Nick.

And how is that working out, I asked Bohdan Zabawskyj.

“Facebook has been extremely encouraged by the use of Rypple. They are looking forward to new features being introduced over the next few months that will facilitate recognition and collaboration,” says Bohdan.

I suspect that having Facebook as a customer has done more than that for Rypple, but that’s another story. (Tip: they recently integrated with Jive Software, so now Jive’s social business platform allows Jive users to send meaningful messages of thanks to their colleagues.)

So there you have it people. Three Toronto companies, all tackling the Social Enterprise in their own way.

Before content was king. Now context is king.

I see the future end goal of the truly social enterprise to avoid silos at all costs, and to deliver both content and context in a single experience—across multiple channels—in order to enable seamless, continuous collaboration with customers, prospects and employees.

To me, the Social Enterprise is the technology stack thats enables a social business. But to be a truly social business means having massive cultural changes to go with that as well. CxOs need to know that they can better position themselves and their organizations, by embracing the Social Enterprise and furthering their overall business agenda.

The three staple CRM pillars, Sales, Service and Marketing will be first impacted by the Social Enterprise, with other aspects of the business such as HR following closely.

This space may take a decade to fully mature. But when 900-pound enterprise software gorillas like Salesforce and Jive make it their agenda, you can be sure that firms all around the world will start to take notice.

So gear up to engage with customers and employees in ways that are more social and mobile than ever!

A blog post isn’t limited to existing solely on that blog. It can be passed around via email, shared on social networking sites, submitted to social bookmarking sites, included in newsletters our clients produce for our users and much  more.

Still not convinced a company blog is valuable? Here are a few reasons why:

1. Establish ourselves as an industry authority
Users want to purchase from/work with the best in the business. Routinely updating a company blog can help you build our brand’s reputation as an industry expert and valuable resource.

2. Help educate your users/clients
Having an educated target audience can make it much easier for you to promote your products/services. If potential clients have a firm understanding of your product benefits, it is easier to position your brand as the solution to their problem. You don’t have to explain as much general information in your messaging and can focus on more important topics.

3. Build our online presence
Individual blog posts can rank in the search engines like any page on your website. When optimized to include the most appropriate keywords, your blog can help increase your brand’s presence in the SERP for the related long-tail keywords searches.

4. Humanizes your brand
People like to do business with other people, not faceless corporations. When you attach an actual name to your blog (whether it be our executives or any other employee), you are giving your company an actual persona. Having content written by a person and not “Company Name” means you can afford to throw a little style and personality into your posts.

5. Promote your products/services
A business blog should mainly be used to inform and educate, but a little self-promoting post every now and again is perfectly acceptable. A business blog is the perfect place to announce new product launches or let your readers know about an upcoming tradeshow or conference you will be making an appearance at. Someone who reads your blog has already self-identified themselves as your target audience.

6. Respond to a crisis
Hope this never happens to any of us, but when bad stuff happens, companies don’t have the luxury of hiding out until it blows over or holding a press conference next week. The public, especially clients expect a response and they expect it now. Silence is almost never the best option and a company blog is a fantastic place to issue public statements and updates as a situation gets resolved. You want to keep the lines of communication open and transparent.

Now that you’ve seen the video, you can check out the top 10 list of my most-loved, most-used “productivity” iPad Apps.

Netflix

 Price: free

The Netflix app on the iPad is a true beauty. Not only can you download this free app and instantly watch TV shows & movies streaming from Netflix, it is also a portable screen!

I mention the Netflix app for iPad, because the streaming on it is superbly optimized. As well, it enhances the value of a Netflix subscription by letting you watch shows and movies directly on your mobile device.

So now you can watch your favourite show while you cook or you can snuggle up with a nice movie if you don’t feel like getting out of bed on the weekend.

iDisplay

Price: $4.99

This is a handy litter app that can easily turn your iPad into a convenient extension for your Mac or Windows desktop monitor. It helps increase productivity by maximizing the viewable area of your main monitor.

My husband often uses this app when he is on set shooting his movie and needs an extra viewing screen. I have seen my developer friends use this often as well when they need more than 1 screen out of the office…

Dragon Dictation

Price: both free and paid versions available

Dragon Dictation has been around for ever. I’ve been using them on my Mac for many years now and they have both a free and a paid app on the App store. The free app isn’t as powerful or agile as the paid app. So if you’re looking to use this for business,  suggest you buy the paid app instead.

Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text or email messages, and it is up to 5 times faster than typing on the keyboard!

This app works perfectly when you’re in a meeting with a bunch of people and note-taking is necessary. With this app you can focus on content, not on typing.

WebEx for iPad

Price: free

Mobile meetings have never been so easy! Simply tap into online meetings with your iPad.

This poweruful iPad App has all the standard WedEx features, with the exception of the training center. But then again, if you do intend to train a bunch of folks, doing so on an iPad in a public place is probably not anybody’s idea of professional. So personally, I dont feel the loss.

Cisco has done a great job of making this already simple program, even more simple and intuitive for iPad users.

SimpleMind+

Price: both free and paid versions available

One of the best mind mapping tools out there for iPad, that allows users to conduct easy brainstorming. Great tool, especially for visual thinkers.

Often one may not be brainstorming with others per se, but you can still use SimpleMind+ to collect your ideas and structure your thoughts.

Again, the paid version is better than the free version; but if you’re just trying to get the hang of it and see if its useful to you or not, try the free version first.

“You’ve got to find what you love”

These are the words uttered by Steve Jobs – at the Stanford Commencement speech in 2005 – who just stepped down today on Wednesday, August 23rd 2011, as the CEO of Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable company.

Steve Jobs, with Steve Wozniak, essentially created the personal computer as it is known today. Many years hence, Jobs managed to turn a dying company into a profitable one, introduced a new operating system, a beautiful designed cutting-edge line of computers that evolve faster than the competition’s and basically revolutionized the digital music industry. He did all of this while disrupting the saturated mobile market by introducing a new breed of smart phones and touch technology.

And most recently, and probably something he will no doubt be remembered for, his latest creation – the iPad. Jobs managed to successfully create and market a new class of sub-computers, which reignited the dull and boring tablet market into a thriving consumer delight. Even with several new competitors, the iPad still continues to dominate the tablet market.

The company that Michael Dell said would suffer a slow death and should close down while it still had something to return to its investors, has this year passed Exxon as the world’s most valuable company. Apple now has bigger financial reserves than the U.S. government by several billion dollars, and that is something we can directly thank Steve Jobs for.

In his Stanford address, Jobs goes on to tell three stories that tell us a little bit about how his mind works. His stories were around connecting the dots, artistic subtlety that science can’t capture, love and loss and even death where he described his first tryst with cancer etc. In the end, his speech eloquently explains where he got “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”

He explains,

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.”

In his 1985 interview with Playboy magazine, Jobs tells another story about attending a party and showing off Apple’s new Macintosh to an interested kid and a few adults. When asked why Jobs was seemingly happier in showing off the computer to the kid as opposed to the adults, Jobs responded:

“Older people sit down and ask, “What is it?” but the boy asks, “What can I do with it?””

Jobs further comments on why the computer industry is dominated by young people:

“People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.”

Looking at interviews with Jobs and other Apple executives 20 years later, it becomes clear that the spirit of Apple from 1985 still permeates through the company today. That’s pretty rare for any company, let alone a company in the fast moving world of high-tech. These are truly great accomplishments.

There is also much speculation about how his protege Tim Cook will do. And while most people remain skeptical, (since he appears to lack pzazz and has seemingly big shoes to fill) my husband correctly points out that he has basically been running the company for quite some time now (as COO) and will make an excellent CEO of Apple with continued profitability. But what he wont be able to do, is be Steve Jobs, the legend. And really, that is unfair to expect from anyone.

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 right; 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.

If you don’t already have Google+, you can use this invite link. You can also keep in touch me, here is my Google+ profile.

I especially love when companies invent something new in social networking… For example, I love that Google+ has things called Circles, Hangouts and Sparks. They have not only introduced new terminology, but also new functionality along with a new way to perceiving or using similar features.

I think Google has made a serious come back. Their design and UI suggests they have put much thought into being truly social and away from the typical algorithmic products that they previously put out.

I have described my thoughts on some less obvious features that are awesome, and also what might be missing in Google+. Read my full article on WhatsYourTech or scroll below: