January 2010

What’s the ROI on Social?

January 19, 2010

Dur­ing today’s pre­sen­ta­tion to the Seat­tle Social Media Club, Sean O’Driscoll, com­mu­nity builder and influ­encer mar­ket­ing expert, revealed how he answers the inevitable ques­tions about the ROI on social media and influ­encer mar­ket­ing pro­grams. He held up a phone and rhetor­i­cally asked, “How do you mea­sure the ROI on your tele­phones?” Trans­la­tion: it’s the conversations […]

Last week a power surge knocked out our Com­cast Busi­ness Class ser­vice for part of 2 busi­ness days. My firm relies on a mix of cloud-based and on-premise IT plat­forms, so this out­age was a reminder that the last-mile infra­struc­ture here is still too frag­ile to shift every­thing to the cloud. Liv­ing in the cloud? Watch […]

Last night I heard Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and the new book Drive, speak about the most pow­er­ful well­springs of human moti­va­tion: the intrin­sic moti­va­tors auton­omy, mas­tery and pur­pose. If you haven’t read Drive, here is Daniel Pink’s TEDTalk on human moti­va­tion. An enter­tain­ing 18-minute sum­mary of what behav­ioral sci­en­tists know […]

So here we have two small busi­ness own­ers actively dis­en­chanted with our HP print­ers, and talk­ing to each other about what the qual­ity decline must be doing to HP’s printer brand. And the time we’re both wast­ing as a result. What makes this story so dis­heart­en­ing is that both of us worked for HP ear­lier in our careers. As for­mer employ­ees (and for­mer share­hold­ers), we’d like to feel bet­ter about the brand. So how did HP lose its way?

Revised on January 11, 2010