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"Here is the latest in the very useful series of longitudinal studies on social media use by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth led by Nora Barnes. This one covered Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500. In contrast here is their most recent one on Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500. In this case, there was a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010 and obtained 34% participation. "

Trying to prevent leaks by employees or to fight off hackers only helps so much. Powerful forces are pushing companies to become more transparent. Technology is turning the firm, long a safe box for information, into something more like a sieve, unable to contain all its data. Furthermore, transparency can bring huge benefits. "The end result will be more openness," predicts Bruce Schneier, a data-security guru. It may be useful to think of a computer network as being like a system of roads. Just like accidents, leaks are bound to happen and attempts to stop the traffic will fail, says Mr Schneier, the security expert. The best way to start reducing accidents may not be employing more technology but making sure that staff understand the rules of the road-and its dangers. Transferring files onto a home PC, for instance, can be a recipe for disaster. It may explain how health data have found their way onto file-sharing networks. If a member of the employee's family has joined such a network, the data can be replicated on many other computers.

The typical ambassador ecosystem for a mid to large scale business likely consists of hundreds of employees, customers and partners which can potentially be harnessed for the benefit of the organization. Participation in thought leadership in places Google indexes such as Quora and even Slideshare can influence what shows up on sarch results. Marketing partners should be re-calibrated from focusing primarily on paid media efforts to being active in the overlaps between paid, earned and social media while tapping your companies most active advocates. Your organization has a workforce of employees active on social networks, yet most organizations remain content to have their employees "locked down" vs.being empowered for the benefit of the business.

The arrival of Generation C will have an impact comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution, but it will take place much more quickly. For managers, it is no longer sufficient to plan for the next few quarters, or even the next few years. Companies that aren't willing to determine their strategies for the longer term - 10 to 15 years out - are putting their business models and value chains at risk. Executives must begin now to develop an agenda that includes an analysis of the capabilities and workforces they will need in the next decade and beyond. A critical step will be to make sure that the organization as a whole understands the coming changes, and that there are already people within the organization who are living these changes now, who don't perceive them as a threat, and who can help integrate them into the organization's business plan.

At EMC, instead of starting long e-mail threads, employees can check updates about a project on a Jive page, search for relevant materials, and download the files as they need them. Sales representatives looking for insight about a competitor can query the "competitive community" on EMC's internal social network and get an answer as they walk to a client meeting, Pappas says. The company also now uses Jive's tools externally, to augment user-support forums and to create community or "affinity" pages for clients that use EMC software.

Organizations that are willing to overturn their communication norms can, with today's digital tools, access these benefits. Those that don't embrace Enterprise 2.0, meanwhile, will stay closer to their historical levels of knowing what they know. Which type would you prefer to work for? To invest in?

Mindtouch Executive Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman, writing for Cloudave, identifies Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phillip W. Schiller as the top social Chief Marketing Officer of the Fortune 100.

Collaboration means different things to different people. When some people refer to collaboration, they're talking about technology. And that's part of the problem. Companies think that if they introduce certain technologies, that they're collaborating. But a central point in my book is that tools and technologies never create collaboration. Culture creates collaboration.

If your organization fails to invest in socially responsible measures, or even if anything about your business - such as a faked viral marketing campaign - is perceived to be phony, you will be found out. You will be tweeted about, and a Facebook Causes group will be created against you. As many corporate casualties have discovered, the result of such a campaign can be catastrophic to your firm's reputation and ultimately to its bottom line. Therefore, to avoid a public relations or financial disaster, integrity needs to be part of the DNA of every organization - not just to secure a healthy business environment, but for the organization's own sustainability and competitive advantage. It's worth noting here that I believe the word "integrity" is preferable to the expression "corporate social responsibility," as the latter puts too much emphasis on the notion that corporations should do "good" in the world and be "good" citizens out of some moral or ethical imperative. Of course, that is absolutely true. But what's new - and what organizations need to focus on - is the idea of integrity, as driven by transparency. Without it you cannot build trust, and trust is essential for competitiveness in this new environment. To put it bluntly, regardless of the moral arguments, there are now some hard, bottom-line business reasons for baking integrity into every company.

Stories last. Stories exist in all cultures. By definition, they entertain, educate, preserve, and even help carry on values within communities like Fogo Island. Branding appeals to our emotions and our reason. Stories speak to our deepest questions about our own existence. Stories stick because they hold real value. By definition, they entertain, but they also educate, and even instill moral values. In fact, the best stories guide our actions. They become the source code for who we are and who we want to be. For corporations to survive, they need deeply compelling stories at their heart.

The study found that arts and crafts activities - such as painting, dancing and filmmaking - are closely related to success of the scientists, engineers and other innovators who create new companies and inventions that stimulate the economy. Yet during the past decade Michigan has cut funding for the arts by some 90 percent - from about $25 million in 2002 to $2.3 million this year. In Detroit, officials attempting to balance the budget have proposed large cuts to the city's arts and cultural institutions.

Previous studies have shown that customer satisfaction plays a key role in the health and future success of any company. When customers are satisfied, they keep coming back to the same store and invite their friends to do the same. Now, a new study from the University of Missouri has found that CEOs who pay attention to employees' job satisfaction are able to boost both customer satisfaction and "repurchase intentions," or the number of customers that intend to purchase products from the store.

Businesses that hoard information in their head office and keep staff in the dark on important metrics risk falling behind their competitors, according to MIT business guru Jeanne Ross. For organisations to fully benefit from this information, they need to share it with their staff, customers and business partners, she said. Once these groups get hold of such information, they can use it to take decisions that will boost the business. Customer service reps with a raft of data are more likely to be able to answer customer queries without having to refer the customer on, for example, and in the process save the company both time and money. But instead of spreading this information around, businesses have a tendency to keep it in head office and share it between a small pool of managers, who use it to run the business from the centre.

Companies that build systems that people use have power. But they have to be very very very careful about how they assert that power. It's really easy to come in and try to configure the user through force. It's a lot harder to work diligently to design and build the ecosystem in which healthy norms emerge. Yet, the latter is of critical importance to the creation of a healthy community. Cuz you can't get to a healthy community through force.

Does your company have a strategy? Freek Vermeulen doubts it. And he posits the five main reasons why, too often, a firm's strategy is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they've either never done the work or have forgotten how it's done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, "I'm quitting. I'm joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks' notice." You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary "diving save". Whether it's HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee. It's an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They've quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, "I no longer believe in this company". What's worse is that what they were originally thinking was, "I'm bored". Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

Creating, finding and sharing compelling content can prove to consumers that a company knows its territory, is a thought leader in its industry and wants to help customers keep up-to-date on important developments. Marketers are placing an ever-greater emphasis on content marketing's ability to add value for targets and prospects.

New Google CEO Larry Page, who stepped into the job this week, believes that Google needs to go "social" to compete.To that end, he sent out a company-wide memo last Friday, alerting employees that 25% of their annual bonus will be tied to the success or failure of Google's social strategy in 2011.

There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation. Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen's Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space--our lives today.