This is one of the most refreshing ideas in business today, have managers actually held accountable for how well their divisions are doing, and how much money they are making. In the only instance I have seen of this phenomenon in a long time, Microsoft top leaders all took a pay cut because of the recession.

When you look at over compensated executives (See “Top 5 over compensated executives” over at CNN Money), and it seems after the banking meltdown and how compensation has become a huge issue that is getting the G-20’s attention, it is refreshing to see senior management being held accountable for anything. Microsoft has done a good deed by setting an example that it is possible to hold senior management accountable for the performance of their company without people running out the doors because they got a few hundred thousand less in overall compensation.

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Here’s a summary of a free white paper that’s available from technology research firm Quocirca, Reaping the Benefits of Unified Customer Communication Management: Read More…

6 Questions to Assess Your PR Vendor’s SEO/Social Media Readiness

Recently Jason Falls made an insightful comment on his blog about PR professionals being “social media ready”. In that post, he cited the need for specific social media marketing skills to be assessed for companies evaluating the effectiveness of their PR efforts.

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A couple of days ago, I had the great pleasure of engaging in conversation with someone who has been a huge influence over the past twenty years in shaping a great deal of my thinking about organizational communication and employee engagement.

That ‘someone’ is Roger D’Aprix, a man who IABC named as “one of the most influential thinkers in the communication profession in the last 25 years.” We have one coincidence in our professional lives in that we both worked for William M Mercer (as it was then called, today known simply as Mercer), the actuaries and human resources management consultants, at the same time in the early 1990s, on different sides of the Atlantic.

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AIIM recently published a useful study on Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0. It provides more encouraging news for enterprise 2.0. It finds that business take up of enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. This supports the study from Toby Ward I recently posted on (see New Study Finds Social Media Becoming Mainstream on Corporate Intranet). According to this AIIM report, there has been a significant increase in the understanding of how Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing.
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Ok, I am going to go out on a limb today. Normally, I really try to keep things clean and professional. You’ll see that I rarely infuse personal stuff and much less inappropriate stuff on my Twitter or Facebook accounts. But, today, to prove a point, I think my example might push into a slightly more personal or inappropriate space in hopes that the information given will help better understand online social media as it relates to offline socializing, giving two case study scenarios. Read More…

This will not be an unfamiliar cry from people who have read my posts before, wherever that may have been. I am sure I have used the words caution, sales, and search marketing in the same sentence at least once (or maybe a thousand times). Well, make it 1001. As the economy continues to crawl along (or move backwards depending on the day), this will be even more important as sales people get (gulp!) desperate. I am not afraid to say that there is nothing worse for business than a desperate sales person and that it holds true on both sides of the equation, meaning for the employer and the client.

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While Google offers advice on hiring SEO consultants, there’s not much information about how to get the most value afterwards.  There’s an impressive amount of information and resources for webmasters on SEO related topics, but I’m pretty sure Google as a company has never hired a SEO agency and therefore isn’t in the client/vendor relationship advice business.

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