The Social Business

As we approach the end of 2010 and head into the New Year, these savvy companies are realizing that the front end is not enough:  unless you actually become a social business you can’t be a social brand.

Could this be why some companies have been ambivalent about open, social engagement?

David Armano of Edelman thinks so – in his  excellent presentation on SlideShare he says many firms are not ready for social media.  He shows why this is the case and what you need to do internally to get ready for external social media engagement.

(read the rest on b2cmarketinginsider.com)

5. Social vs. Search

In 2010, we saw social media usage continue to surge globally. Facebook alone gets 25% of all U.S. pageviews and roughly 10% of Internet

 visits. Instead of focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), in 2011 we’ll see social media optimization become a priority at many news organizations, as they continue to see social close the gap on referrals to their sites.

Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics and news industry analyst at Outsell, recently pointed out that social networks have become the fastest growing source of traffic referrals for many news sites. For many, social sites likeFacebook

 and Twitter only account for 10% to 15% of their overall referrals, but are number one in growth. For news startups, the results are even more heavy on social. And of course, the quality of these referrals is often better than readers who come from search. They generally yield more pageviews and represent a more loyal reader than the one-off visitors who stumble across the site from Google.

Early Adopters And Pioneers Have Benefited From Social

Across executive board rooms and even in living rooms, social business is all the rage.  In 2010, social crm (SCRM) and Enterprise 2.0 (E20) rose into mainstream conversation.  Despite the mindshare and awareness, a majority of business leaders have yet to begin these initiatives.  The good news – those organizational leaders who have adopted disruptive technologies in social, have already realized the benefits.  Those benefits include:

• Faster product time to market and customer adoption
• Reduced marketing spend and increased marketing engagement
• Reduced incident to resolution times that lead to greater customer retention
• Greater market influence and brand awareness
• Improved collaboration across departments and improved knowledge bases

(Read more on Enterprise Irregulars)

Why tomorrow’s Wall Street leaders don’t like bonuses

By Peter Cappelli, Michael Useem, Matthew Bidwell and John Paul MacDuffieThursday, December 16, 2010; 4:00 PM

For the past 20 years, during midterm exams at the Wharton School, we’ve asked our MBA students to write a paper about how they were paid and managed at their last job. These students average about 28 years of age; many of them have already worked for big Wall Street firms and received big Wall Street bonuses.

Managers have long believed that the prospect of a bonus can motivate young workers to work harder and smarter, even in a year like this one, when bonuses are expected to fall. By making a huge amount of an employee’s compensation - possibly even twice his or her regular salary - dependent on the firm’s results and the individual’s performance, managers hope to align workers’ incentives with those of the larger company.

Yet, in reviewing the roughly 800 essays our students handed in this year, we see a different story. Students increasingly distrust the bonus system and contend that annual bonuses are too large a part of the way they are managed, often serving as a substitute for thoughtful supervision or meaningful reviews.