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:

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?

It has been suspected by many people, that the man behind JonathansCard, Mr. Jonathan Stark is somehow affiliated with Starbucks and that he didn’t randomly choose to use Starbucks as his experiment. If this is the case, well kudos to Jonathan as this is genius. Even if it means Starbucks falling flat on its face, yet again, it still got them cost-effective marketing, didn’t it?

Jonathan Stark has estimated that his card has gone through about $4,500 and that most of it has been over the last 2 days. He goes on to say that most people are “super cool” about it and like his idea. He indicated that the number of people getting drinks vs. people contributing is about 2:1.

Not bad at all Mr. Stark! (ironically, his last name keeps making me think of IronMan)

There has been a lot of studies done on karma behaviorism and more often than not, it has been found that in western countries (not including the UK, they are an anomaly), the number of givers/ good samaritans/ socially responsible people far outweigh the number of takers/ idiots/ douches/ morons.

Dan Ariely, the author of ‘Predictably Irrational’ talks about the effect of paying-it-forward and how it results in communities becoming less selfish. He says that the majority of peole will generally take only as much as they need, and on occasion, return the favor. Of course there will always be the small minority that will abuse it, but the vast majority compensates for it.

I have personally seen some good examples of pay-what-you-want or pay-what-you-think-its-worth models… and they seem to work well. Especially for restaurants and such where you can eat/sample the food before paying for it.

This one however is new for me. I don’t anticipate this to be sustainable after it reaches a certain tipping point, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

I’d like to propose a few extensions to this social experiment:

Extension 1: remove the anonymity around withdrawals or usage of the Starbucks card, making the taker known somehow.

Extension 2: make the topping-up of the card, public in some way, with an option for the giver to post to Facebook, Twitter, G+ etc.

Extension 3: allow anyone topping up the card with $100 or more, having bragging rights, displated publicly in some manner.

I suspect each of these updates to the social experiment will dramatically influence our behavior. I’d be curious to see how behavior changes as we go from extension to extension, and I’d very much think that people will display enormous acts of kindness, should there be something in it for them.

Pretty much the same mechanism that Kickstarter and Kiva follow. Seems to have worked well for them!

Well the short answer is: I recently started a new job as the Director of Marketing at a local Toronto SaaS solutions company called PriceMetrix, prominent in the wealth management and practice intelligence space.

Jobs come and go, but this one is different. I really think we have an opportunity here to build something amazing and triple our growth in 3 years. Lofty goals? Sure. But I wouldn’t do something that I didn’t think was achievable. 

I’ve also been busy with a couple of startup projects in the Toronto area – helping, advising, and strategizing wherever I can; as well as organising kick-ass LadiesLearningCode workshops. This has taken up all my spare time, and as such I’ve have been a little AWOL over the last few months.

I joined PriceMetrix full-time on May 30th and am still in the process of settling in and learning the market. The good news is, that I’m starting to get a good handle on it! I recently presented the marketing plan for the rest of the year to senior management and it was pretty well-received… but the true test comes when it is execution time. And oh boy, are we getting geared up for that or what!

(We’re hiring an Online Marketing Specialist for my team if anybody is interested. Please spread the word!)

In any case, by September 1^st I should be back to normal and in my regular writing/ painting/ eating mode. So thank you everybody for your genuine concern. Everything is great, I am still alive and everything is well.

P.S. – Find me on Google Plus if you’re there. And if anybody needs an invite, use this.

They then tend look for issues with their quality of content or frequency of posting (which do contribute to uptake 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):

1. Your organization is not be ready.

BOOM! Yes, you heard that right. Your business may in fact not be ready to be social yet.

Transparency is key to success with social media. If openness is not an intrinsic part of your business (sometimes regulatory and/or legal pressures create these situations), then how do you create engagement or maintain dialogue with your market? You can’t… it becomes very difficult when you cannot share things or comment freely.

As well, if your organization doesn’t have a culture of sharing information – successes and problems with customers and partners – then social media will not work for you. Social Media is after all, about being social and communicating openly. Of course you have the right to protect and support your company’s proprietary information, but don’t confuse that kind of confidentiality with an ability to answer questions and build engagement opportunities at large.

2. The way information flows in the world has changed and your organization does not understand how it has changed.

Now everybody and their mother has an opinion about something. Do you sell CRM software? Well, before anybody considers even trying your software, they will do their own research – they will ask their friends in the business for a referral or opinion, check out blogs and forums on the subject, maybe even post a question on Facebook. The end consumer/ user is now doing a lot more research before they even begin to talk to you i.e. well before you identify them as a prospect.

If the consumer happens to hear good things, then he or she will engage with you. But if she or he hears not-so-great things, or worse, hears nothing at all, then you’re in trouble. Hearing nothing at all is worse because it basically signals that you are vanilla, and that you’re not even trying to be chocolate

The fact is, this is exactly what social media can solve for you – the problem of being vanilla.

Think of social media as your opportunity to show your personality. Show that you care about your customers and their opinions, and show your competence in a particular area or subject matter. Social media allows you to grow and remain perpetually engaged with your community; thereby taking them along with the changes you are experiencing.

3. Your organization does not have a sense of community.

Things like user conferences, team events, blog writing and participation will set you up to be successful with social media. If your organization is not participatory, doesn’t engage in these activities or doesn’t believe in content marketing, then building a presence in a social media is the absolute last thing you should tackle. Focus instead of creating engagement in the obvious places first, before jumping online and trying to cajole a bunch of people to like you.

As stated earlier, being social is all about sharing. If you have no relevant content to share – then what is the point of trying to be social? You need to contribute useful content to your community in a way that is designed for social media and meets its unique needs. For example, don’t go posting complex whitepapers and expect uptake on that. Instead, split the content into bite sized chunks and make them visual if you can help it. You need to provide for and welcome community interaction on all your online properties, not just via social networks.

4. Approval processes and bureaucracy slows you down.

Social Media is driven by timeliness of information. You see an opportunity and you take it. Having multiple approval processes will bottleneck your advancement in social media. So eliminate any hint of bureaucracy and trust your employees to make the right choices and say the right things.

Large conglomerates like Coca-Cola have policies in place to deal with difficult situations; however if you are a small to mid-sized organization, you likely don’t need a full-fledged policy per say. A few guidelines built for employees with input from employees is more than enough. You might also want to make sure your HR practices help hire and grow the right employees as well as empower them to become brand ambassadors of the company.

5. Social Media is not integrated into the business.

Social isn’t the responsibility of just one individual or one department. You don’t just hire a social media expert and let him or her “figure it out”. It needs integration across business lines.

As a starting point, get rid of disconnected customer interaction points. This means that Customer Service, Technical Support, Sales, Product Management and all other customer touch points within an organization should be in the loop with what’s going on over the fence. Next, you want to enable employees in each of these departments to communicate and engage with customers and users across multiple media. This means that you could have multiple people or groups managing your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other accounts. This also includes developing a process to listen and respond to online conversations, while maintaining a consistent brand experience.

6. You let Likes, Follows and Tweets become the de facto ROI measurement of your social media campaigns.

True ROI cannot be realized with one-hit wonders. You must pick what you measure carefully and it all depends on your business goals. For example, do you want to increase reach or increase market penetration? Do you want to provide superior customer service to existing customers or do you want to find and service prospects only? You need to decide this before you dive in.

If you are a new entrant in the social media space, my personal opinion is that aligning social media goals with branding and search marketing goals are the best way to determine ROI. Some of the types of metrics you might consider are: branding awareness, brand recall, customer retention, propensity to buy etc. Also, be sure to use some social media measurement software to see what’s working for you. And be sure to check out some examples from leading companies. Bazaarvoice is one site that provides some useful links. I also found some tips on Mashable on how successful brands are using Twitter.

If you have observed some obvious social miscalculations at your organizations, feel free to share what happened, as well as your thoughts on how best to fix it!

One common oversight that organizations make when deliberating over their thought-leadership strategy is that they fail to leverage the skills, influence and deep insight of their employees; in the interest of maintaining control.

So what happens? Well, everything gets funneled through “corporate accounts” and the puck ends up stopping at marketing.

This is a common problem, especially with large organizations that don’t have the same flexibility and nimbleness that smaller businesses might have. This is exactly where small B2B companies can really thrive and empower their employees to solve their content problems.

Lets talk about how YOU – whether you are the Marketing person, the CEO or the HR manager – can begin to build a loose consortium of employees to contribute towards your thought-leadership objectives. (For the purposes for this post, we can use a company blog as an example of a landing point for an organization to create influence, educate buyers and engage with existing and new customers.)

1) A well-written, well-curated blog can seldom be a solo activity. You’re going to need a few wing-men/women to back you up and provide interesting perspectives.

-      Some things to think about include:

• What will the blog accomplish for your business.
• What measurements matter and what metrics will you track.
• Analyze your current web traffic – where is it coming from, what are the types of comments (online and offline) your customers and partners are making – and then connect the dots.

-      Next, choose realistic goals for your blog. The first 90 days will be pure trial and error. Remember, there are no wrong answers.

-      Ensure that you reward your blogging team in some manner. I don’t mean prizes or gifts or expensive lunches. More like… try to return the favour, you know? Give them an opportunity to grow their profile, their personal brand and establish a sphere of influence for each contributing person.

Such as your VP of Client Services might give his take on a certain subject, while the Head of Sales could come at it at a totally different angle – which is great! That’s the point actually – for your message to resonate with the community and spur discussion!

2) Next, lets talk about choosing the right people. While thinking about whom you could use from within your existing organization on your blog team; remember to place special attention on having some diversity in the group – it will add to the versatility of your group while remaining objective and on-task.

-      You don’t require big names or fancy titles to make your blog effective. Sure, it might be nice to have a few well-known or high profile people in the mix; but that isn’t necessary. Focus on getting people who might be instead have a deep insight into your organization’s business, customer needs, sales triggers etc as well as have a decent writing style or “voice”, have a sense of humor (even if it is self-deprecating), are somewhat approachable in person (because it totally shows online) and most importantly have a willingness to participate (there is nothing worse than forcing or pressuring an employee to contribute to a blog they don’t want to).

-      You are looking for interesting and credible voices, with a uniqueness to it, as well as a sense of authority. Whether or not they have a large number of connections on LinkedIn, friends on Facebook or a massive Twitter following is immaterial. We are focusing on their potential and on building their sphere of influence along with ours. Opting for a cross-section of contributors from different departments and parts of the organization can add to the awesomeness of your blog.

-      Plus, not ALL of your content has to be original. You can piggyback on someone else’s content and write an introduction or an analysis about it; or simply curate from within your industry or community. Check out BrainPickings for example. Their content is mostly not original, but it is so superbly curated and targeted that one automatically makes it a staple in their weekly reading. So empower your team to contribute something interesting and relevant they might have read elsewhere and embed it into your content accordingly.

-      If at all you are worried about making the wrong choice in your blog team, you may consider having some king of probationary period for contributors. It might help letting contributors off the team gracefully without embarrassment.

3) Lastly, lets talk about having a content plan. Plan with a capital P! You don’t want to leave the blogging subject matter entirely in the hands of the contributors. You want to come up with some sort of editorial calendar, even if it isn’t followed to the tee.

-      An editorial calendar can be a useful way to keep contributors informed about topics they can explore to keep them on-message as well as adhere to deadlines and due dates. The frequency with which you intend to publish will be part of the mix obviously.

-      Some standard elements that should be part of your editorial calendar include:

• The topic or subject matter (along with a title if possible)
• The category of the post (what is the broad topic you can bucket it under)
• Any media or assets that will be included/ embedded within the post such as a whitepaper, case-study, video, poll, survey results, Powerpoint, podcast, articles in the press, news reports, infographics etc.
• The vehicle with which you will communicate this post (your email lists, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Scribt, Slideshare, Stumbleupon etc)

-      Your editorial calendar must allow be in sync with your PR strategy. That way you can time things accordingly and follow-up features in the press with a more through explanation etc.

Hopefully this has provided a starting point to empowering your employees to contribute to your content marketing efforts. Employee Generated Content (EGC) can reduce production costs for enterprise businesses, attract innovative thinkers and create an alternate source for valuable content creation and curation; while increasing employee participation and engagement with the company’s grand vision.

If you found this post useful, I’d love to hear any other ideas, especially in the B2B space. If you’re a marketer (and possible struggle with the same issues) make sure you leave a comment or drop me a line!