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Forrester Research defines digital intelligence this way: The capture, management and analysis of data to provide a holistic view of the digital customer experience that drives the measurement, optimization and execution of marketing tactics and business strategies."

What are the key steps of the invention process? I describe it with my model, the Innovation Engine. First, there's an internal part. People normally start with imagination, being able to conjure ideas up in your mind. You need a base of knowledge with which you can work; if you don't have a base of knowledge, then you don't have a toolbox for your imagination. You also have to have the motivation and drive to solve the problem, because getting beyond the obvious answers requires a tremendous amount of activation energy.You need the imagination, you need the knowledge, and you need the attitude, which is the spark for this process, but there are also a lot of external factors that people do not take into account. What are these external factors?You need an environment where creativity is supported: everything from the physical space you're in, to the people you're with, the rules, the rewards, the constraints, the culture, and the resources present. All of these things have a huge impact on how an individual, a team, or an organization functions from a creative perspective.

How can managers create an environment nourishing to creativity? I've talked to some executives about this question, and they say, "My job as a manager is to create a habitat that fosters innovation." The innovation engine can get sparked anywhere--it's a kind of Möbius cube--there's no beginning and no end. If you're a manager, your job is to create a habitat that stimulates the imagination of your team, of your employees, of your colleagues.

I'll come into class with a suitcase and say, "I travel a lot and I really don't like my suitcase. It causes a lot of problems: I'm traveling and it doesn't fit into the overhead bin, I'm always running through crowds and its getting in the way, it's really annoying. Could you design a new suitcase for me?" And the students go off and design a new suitcase. Then I come back and say, "Okay, why do we use a suitcase in the first place?" We use a suitcase to have the things we need when we're traveling at our destination. Solve that problem. Once you take the suitcase out of the equation and open up the frame of possibilities, then there's some really interesting solutions. What if I didn't have to bring my suitcase at all? Maybe it's spray-on clothes. Maybe I have a suitcase that I pack once and then it travels around the world, wherever I'm going to be.Once you open up the frame of possibility, really interesting ideas come forward. One thing I try to do with my students is to try to help them understand how to frame a problem.

social media is becoming a skill, not a job. Companies like Intel and Dell and IBM are leading the way in broadly distributed social participation, giving thousands of employees the opportunity to win hearts and mind in social and with smart content.

This decentralization of social communication has widespread ramifications for social media management software vendors, as it puts additional emphasis on triage and workflow tools.

The days of one social media manager handling Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the rest is coming to a close (as is the era of the one or two person content marketing team) and the same way all of us have a corporate email address and phone number, we’ll all (or nearly all) have a role to play on behalf of the company in social and content marketing, eventually.

Hourly wages and the classic 40-hour work week have trained us to measure our labor by the number of hours we log. However, this mindset is dead wrong when applied to today's professionals. The value of lawyers, consultants, and analysts isn't the time they spend, but the value they create through their knowledge.

when managers judge their employees' work by the time they spend at the office, they impede the development of productive habits. By focusing on hours worked instead of results produced, they let professionals avoid answering the most critical question: "Am I currently using my time in the best possible way?" As a result, professionals often use their time inefficiently.

this manager praised his or her employee not for the value that he added to the meetings that he attended, but merely for his physical presence. Given this structure of rewards, it is no surprise that we keep seeing unnecessary and unproductive meetings.

the ability to articulate your story or that of your company is crucial in almost every phase of enterprise management. It works all along the business food chain: A great salesperson knows how to tell a story in which the product is the hero. A successful line manager can rally the team to extraordinary efforts through a story that shows how short-term sacrifice leads to long-term success. An effective CEO uses an emotional narrative about the company’s mission to attract investors and partners, to set lofty goals, and to inspire employees.

If you still want to work in the tech world but are reconsidering coding, designer Nick Marsh suggests doing something coders find useful. Brilliant as great developers are, there are plenty of things that they hate doing or are just no good at. Coding requires a level of focus bordering on tunnel vision, and if there’s one thing developers hate, it’s distractions. For a coder “distractions” mean dealing with business people, management, customers or, in fact, anyone outside the engineering team. If you want to get popular with developers, spare them from some of these interactions, which they often see as a shocking waste of their time. A great product manager, for example, is as crucial to success as a competent coder. It doesn’t matter how clear the code is, if nobody wants the product. Translate the language of the developers into that of the users and vice versa. Promote the product. All makers of creative work want their work to be used. Marsh concludes that it’s much more important to understand coders than to understand code

the best approach may be to get your fans to support your reputation for you.

Reputation defenders will do anything from passively monitoring social media to creating paid, positive reviews in order to counteract negative posts - and dominate the first page of search results. (For more insight on how the process works, see Brian Proffitt's post: Inside The Mysterious World Of Reputation Management.)

Wyer's advice for businesses looking at negative reviews is to stay positive. In almost every instance, an aggressive rebuttal will look defensive. “Our experience is that, in most cases, this approach only antagonizes the attacker and this, in fact, can escalate the online conversation, accusations and attacks.”

median teen Facebook user has 300 friends. Girls and older teenagers tend have substantially larger friend networks than boys and younger teens.

while 70 percent of teens surveyed are Facebook friends with their parents, focus groups conducted by Pew show that this kind of interaction is the main problem for the age group. Teens felt like with mom and dad electronically close by, they couldn’t truly express themselves, opting for sites such as Twitter and Instagram: In focus groups, many teens expressed waning enthusiasm for Facebook. They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they described as happening frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the site is still where a large amount of socializing takes place, and teens feel they need to stay on Facebook in order to not miss out.

Unlike many of their adult counterparts, teens feel they’re pretty good at managing their Facebook privacy settings. 60 percent of teens aged 12 through 17 in the study say they have their Facebook profile private, so only their friends can see it.

Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites.

These recommendations, Sternberg told me, are based on social recommendations on the site from your friends on Google+ (only if you are signed in, of course), what the story you just read was about, the story’s author and some of Google’s “secret sauce.”

The new Google+-based recommendations, interestingly, only appear once a reader slides back up on a page. This, Google’s analytics show, is a pretty good indicator that a user has finished reading a post (even if there is still more text left on the page). The recommendation widget then slides up from the bottom and one extra click brings up more relevant items for the page. The other option is to show the widget after a user scrolls past a configurable CSS entity.

Even the illusion of progress causes an accelerating effect.

Take time to reflect on and acknowledge how your work has progressed. All it takes is a pause to get the satisfying sight of all your own kind of accumulating Bionicles rather than letting them slip past you, unrecognized sources of fuel.

Your motivation surges the closer you are to reaching your goal. Something about seeing the finish line lights a fire, even when you’re not always on the right track.

people who claimed their “usual” workweeks were longer than 75 hours were off, on average, by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. Those who claimed that a “usual” workweek was 65–74 hours were off by close to 20 hours. Those claiming a 55–64-hour workweek were still about 10 hours north of the truth. Subtracting these errors, you can see that most people top out at fewer than 60 work hours per week.

We live in a competitive world, and boasting about the number of hours we work has become a way to demonstrate how devoted we are to our jobs.

By the end of the year, 80% of companies plan to use social media for customer service. On the consumer side, 62% of customers have already used social media for customer service issues.

A study by A.T. Kearney found that, of the top 50 brands, 56% did not respond to a single customer comment on their Facebook Page in 2011. Brands ignored 71% of customer’s complaints on Twitter. And, 55% of consumers expect a response the same day to an online complaint, while only 29% receive one.

. Create humanized response models to engender loyalty and build relationships. Many companies are guilty of creating robust and well-planned strategy for social customer service delivery -– but fall at the final and most important hurdle — creating a voice your audience can relate to.

These days, developing a successful online presence requires approaching traditional digital efforts like link-building, web traffic, lead generation, and sales from a decidedly more editorial, content-rich approach: a hybrid marketing and storytelling strategy that drives customer actions by creating, documenting, distributing, and optimizing content. Some companies have created their own internal content development departments or are working with agencies to create everything from infographics to documentaries that highlight where the values, interests, and personality of brand and customer overlap. Coca Cola believes so strongly in the power of content that they are relying on this approach to help them double the size of their business by 2020.

While your office probably looks a lot different than a newsroom, approaching content strategy by thinking like a magazine publisher or a television producer is an effective way to approach content development and promotion. Utilizing influential voices to develop and promote content can help ensure that you meet the first requirement of securing readership and viewers--be interesting.

The people who already create for you: We often hear “write about what you know” because it comes easiest. Identify the talented storytellers within your own walls. Those with an intimate knowledge of company activities are primed to create impactful content, even on a tight deadline. Identify employees who are weekend filmmakers, amateur photographers, poets, and guitar players and invite them to bring these talents to the table.

Storytelling plays a similar role today. It is one of the world’s most powerful tools for achieving astonishing results

a force for turning dreams into goals and then into results

Authenticity, as noted above, is a crucial quality of the storyteller. He must be congruent with his story—his tongue, feet, and wallet must move in the same direction

Teams are often tempted to show off by producing brilliant technical solutions that amaze their peers and management. But often customers would prefer a product that just works effortlessly. From a customer's point of view, the best solutions solve a problem in the simplest way and hide the work that developers are so proud of.

"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified. Then you get into the problem, and you see it's really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions....That's where most people stop." Not Apple. It keeps on plugging away. "The really great person will keep on going," said Jobs, "and find...the key underlying principle of the problem and come up with a beautiful, elegant solution that works."

Development teams often assume that their products are done when no more features can be added. Perhaps their logic should be the reverse: Products get closer to perfection when no more features can be eliminated. As Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

The social network decided that since status updates from pages behave differently than photo, video and link posts, they should be treated differently. While users may see more status updates from friends, pages may see a decline in reach for these types of posts, writes Facebook’s Chris Turitzin, Product Manager, News Feed Ranking:

Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.

Product Manager Andrew Song detailed the new initiative in a Newsroom post, using a post from Bleacher Report about Houston Rockets Center Dwight Howard as an example, and saying that the post may appear in the News Feeds of users who follow or like Bleacher Report, Howard, or both.

organizational psychologists. Work, they say, is "elastic," meaning that it stretches and shrinks to fit the time allotted.

Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.