We’ve arrived at the year social media takes off. Clearly, social media is already booming, but in 2010, businesses are embracing this new marketing tactic like never before. Twitter and Facebook aren’t just for mindless procrastination anymore. Fortune 500’s are signing up for Twitter handles, budgeting thousands of dollars around year-long social media campaigns. But there is still one very important question to answer: What’s it all worth?

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Many business owners and managers are perplexed by the social web. The effect of customer participation with social media on brands is undeniable. The effect of employee participation with social media can be a bit of a quandary.  The range of acceptance for social web activity runs the gamut from IT blocking all internet connections to sites like Twitter and Facebook to the expectation that every employee spend work and personal time as social media brand ambassadors.

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Among the many exceptionally interesting data snacks in the recent MarketingProfs’ State of Social Media report is one showing that businesses of all sizes and types are primarily using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and blogging.

And while it’s on one hand a positive that we’re stating to see some norms and best practices emerge within social media, it’s a tremendous mistake to restrict your social media activities to just the “Big Five.”

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This week I thought I would write about decision-centric organizations. Organizations face many challenges in today’s business climate. Organizations whose success or failure is determined by the decisions they make (which claims to pay, which customers to target, which transactions to investigate for fraud) are handicapped by systems that are centered on processes or functions. As a result, these organizations struggle to improve business productivity while managing costs and find it hard to make changes in their systems quickly, despite a pressing need to do so. To succeed, these organizations need to move their thinking from processes and functions to decisions. They need to become a decision-centric organization as only a decision-centric organization is going to be able to deliver agility, control, compliance, personalization and decision support in a coherent, integrated way.

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There’s a movie I saw recently that encapsulates the way most people feel about the job market, ‘Up in the Air’. In the future, I think this will be the film we all look back on to catch a glimpse of how the first 21st century decade looked. I won’t go into all the details, but one aspect of the movie which caught my eye was the aspect of firing people and their reactions to it. Which in many ways is directly correlated with employee morale.
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It’s so funny to think of how our country has changed in just 50 years. What is relatively a small speck of time in the history of the Earth, feels like eons in our society and culture. Take the workplace for instance. If you took a snapshot of what a business looked like in 1959 and compared it to a photo in 2009, the changes would astonish you. The attitude of your employees are probably different as well, and there’s good reason for that.
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‘Streamlining’ has been a buzzword in the management field for quite some time now. I’m sure when the printing press was first invented, someone said “Hmm, this will definitely streamline my business”. Of course, utilizing paper or any other technology for streamlining your business is only effective if you have the knowledge to do so. So here are some strategies and tips to successfully streamline your business with social media.
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Chris Walker, on Twitter, asked a question I get often: “Any advice on getting followers?”

It’s the worst question in social media. Sorry Chris for picking on your question.

It’s actually a question lots of people wonder, but it’s the kind of thing that no one really can answer.

Why?

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