Do any of the following scenarios ring true for you?

  • There’s a substantial gap between the information you have and the information you’d like when you’re thinking about your key decisions,

  • You’re pretty sure your customers don’t have all the relevant information about you when they’re thinking about their purchase decisions,

  • You’re involved, or getting involved, with social media because you “have to be part of the conversation,” but the connection to profitability is uncomfortably murky, or
  • You’d have a hard time articulating what business value your website is supposed to deliver and, if you can, how good a job it’s doing.

  • An integrated information, knowledge and thinking strategy can align your social media, web sites, databases, other traditional applications and in person activities into a multi-faceted strategic asset that can help you:

  • Create value,

  • Innovate into new possibilities, and

  • Win in the emerging imagination economy.

  • Who’s in charge of thinking about how your company uses information?

    March 21, 2010

    If you’re like many small companies, you don’t have a designated Chief Information Officer(CIO.)  But that shouldn’t stop you from taking a strategic approach to information.
    According to The New Voice of the CIO, a recent study from IBM, this involves:

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    Web Marketing and Business Improvement in the Thinking Organization

    March 16, 2010

    Web 1.0 was about learning.  Web 2.0 is about thinking.
    It’s no longer enough to build a website where prospects can learn about your products. The thinking strategist now provides resources that help prospects think about their needs in a context that nourishes their appreciation of the company’s unique value proposition.
    It’s no longer enough

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    How student-developers will harness the tablet computer to transform learning

    January 30, 2010

    The iPad and other tablet computers will fundamentally change the nature of education research, content and delivery because there has never been such an overlap between users and developers.
    Many of the high school, college and other students who’ll be using a tablet computer to engage their course content are innovative and adept programmers who’ll create [...]

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    Using Social Media in Education

    January 19, 2010

    Social Media is a learning tool, a course of study, a source of new revenues and a way to enhance marketing, admissions, retention and career placement.
    It also offers significant competitive advantage to educational organizations because of its proven appeal to your customers, the lack of products being offered them and a substantial body of knowledge [...]

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    Moving from Above-the-Workflow Events to In-the-Workflow Events

    January 13, 2010

    In his book “Thinking and Deciding,” Jonathan Baron describes three types of thinking:
    “We think when we are in doubt about how to act, what to believe, or what to desire.”
    In-the-workflow thinking, the first type, makes the decisions people are facing in their every day work life and above-the-workflow thinking, the second and third types, invites [...]

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    Wave, tacit knowledge and the competitive advantage of face to face events

    December 13, 2009

    Wave is both a great way for a group to record what it’s learning and an incredibly powerful learning environment.  This combination holds two profound and profitable promises for the face to face event industry:

    As a learning record, it will allow the Event Industry to fully embrace the outcomes focus of modern business and create [...]

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    Google Wave, Twitter and the Transformation of Event Marketing

    December 7, 2009

    Google Wave is an exciting new collaborative tool and in their suggestions about how it could be used, organizing events is first on Google’s list.
    I think Wave and Twitter will combine to transform event marketing by taking social media to the next level because Wave finally gives people an essentially social media subject about which [...]

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    Strategic Social Media Community Management

    November 25, 2009

    In their recent article “Social media:  The new hybrid element of the promotion mix” , W Glynn Mangold and David Faulds give some tips for using social media as part of an organization’s integrated marketing communications strategy.  What I found most interesting was their conclusion that although we can’t control the discussions on the social [...]

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    Using Crowd Sourcing to replace the sales funnel with something more reflective of Social Media

    October 1, 2009

    Isn’t it time to get rid of sales funnel thinking?  Consider all the ways it’s inconsistent with the ethos of Social Media:
    It emphasizes the company’s perspective, not the customer’s,
    Funnels are for homogenous liquids.  Customers are all different,
    Stickiness is anathema to funnels, yet essential to Social Media,
    The customer isn’t even visible,
    No give to get,
    It suggests the [...]

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    Knowledge and Imagination Have the Same Relationship as Electricity and Magnetism

    September 17, 2009

    Electromagnetic theory is an interesting model for thinking about the relationship between knowledge and imagination. The former involves flows of physical energy, the latter flows of psychic energy.
    Just as a flow of electrons creates a magnetic field, a flow of knowledge (eg, a stimulating discussion) creates an imaginative field and just as a changing magnetic [...]

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