January – February 2010

International Networking Week is an initiative of BNI that will be held globally from February 1 – 5, 2010, featuring a number of networking events simultaneous across the world! BNI is the largest business networking organization in the world, offering their members the opportunity to share ideas, contacts and most importantly, business referrals.

Deloitte LLP’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) practice’s October 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, evaluates the perceived potential of online communities and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them. Conducted in conjunction with Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, this second edition of the Tribalization of Business Study measured the

A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world. So, just like in the old days when companies had to figure out how to deal with email, they have now to figure out how to deal with Facebook and all other new media venues.

Whether you’re writing your social media policy from the beginning, or developing it organically in reaction to situations as they arise – here are 8 tips you should consider, as they could help you to avoid any unnecessary problems:

The fear of too much “me” in “social media” is omnipresent and shakes communities up to be open to embrace regulatory systems, power structures, and hierarchies. However, we all know that this shouldn’t be over-exaggerated either as it could cost us no less than the future.

It was interesting for me to read that according to IDC, traditional corporate culture remains the largest barrier to successful social media initiatives, simply because social media challenges the hierarchical management model of many organizations. Well, everybody can imagine the challenges organizations have to embrace, if they intend to deploy and manage social media initiatives

Social networks are definitely one of the hottest trends around and the business world has not been spared its rapid advance. So just how useful are social networks in a marketer’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts and how can they benefit businesses?

It seems like yesterday when companies rediscovered the art of talking with customers, not at them. Thanks to Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, among others, companies realized that customers wanted to enter into a conversation with them, if not to benefit their future needs, at least to solve a particular problem, demand or expectation.

 Most of us have come to the point where we’ve  pondered the decision of whether to have multiple social media accounts (business vs. pleasure). Some have had success doing this, but most not. Facebook’s new privacy policy allows more individual controls, but it also allows for more openness at the same time. Facebook, like other

The section Social Media of the “Federal Association of Digital Economy” (Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft – BVDW) in Germany published recently some guidelines for the respectful exposure to social media and defined a “Social Media Code of Ethics” that recommends companies when communicating with bloggers or social network users not to be offended by reviews from