third segment of definitions looks at management styles and processes, the creation of different approaches to processes within the enterprise and its ecosystem, new business models, changing ways of working, constructing agile teams and forming decisions beyond traditional and slow management structures. How will we make it happen and know if it works. We are warned. Gartner predicts 80% of social business efforts will not achieve intended benefits through 2015. There is a problem with that prediction and the perception it creates. What benefits do we intend to achieve? MORE >>

Every business should be working on integrating all data platforms, silos, marketing channels and businesses processes right now in order to have a single customer view and 360 degrees social CRM approach. Nevertheless, to be able to work in a data-driven and customer-centric manner, it is an important exercise. Improving (the value of) the ‘customer equity’ happens by working on and combining the various components (called ‘drivers’) of these three. No marketing activity is an island. No customer-centric business process should be isolated. Integrated. People-centric. MORE >>

Customer-centric marketers know the only approach that works is an integrated one that of course is about a dynamic customer journey. Obviously, every ingredient and channel matters but they have to work in concert and across the silos that still exist in so many businesses. Co-author Rebecca Lieb By now, you probably know what paid, owned and earned media are. If you haven’t, you might be new in marketing or might have missed phenomena such as blogging and forums in the nineties. Easy, although media proliferation made it look harder. Just two considerations. MORE >>

An increasing number of marketers fortunately has understood how “users”, “prospects”, “leads”, “recipients”, “suspects”, “relations” or simply people and their emotional and individual needs, digital signals, social information-gathering processes and buying journeys define what works and what doesn’t. Joe Pulizzi. Content has for many years been treated as the ugly duckling of the online marketing universe. Today, however, this seems to have changed. Content is part of all these needs and processes. As such, content has no meaning. Good storytellers do not equal good content producers. MORE >>

It’s the people that work for it, the people that buy and all others in the so-called ecosystem, such as partners and – in a social and connected reality – the relationships of their relationships. Organizations have been facing a challenge for several years now: a lack of trust among people regarding what they say, the messages they spread and how they act. Relationships are based upon trust. Although the levels and types of trust are different, this goes for business relationships as well. Trust regarding what businesses say and do has been decreasing. Your product can be DOA. MORE >>