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Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media. The results are part of Capgemini's Executive Outsourcing Survey, and follows the firm's launch of its social media management service. Harris surveyed 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies. More than half say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64% of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74%) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the social Web.

Many businesses have invested in multi-channel campaign management systems, giving them the ability to execute campaigns across e-mail, direct mail, and the Web seamlessly. We classify our campaigns as transactional, promotional, and experiential, among others. When we look at reports, we often compare campaign performance against previous campaigns or similar programs running in parallel. While this focus on campaign management has made e-mail one of the most profitable direct channels in the marketer's arsenal, it has clouded our view of something more important: relationship management. If e-mail marketers are focusing on campaign-level strategy and execution, who is left to focus on the broader relationship between the brand and consumer and how content, cadence, and channel preference all come together to create a relationship of trust between the brand and the consumer? Let's look at some examples of how a focus on the relationship changes the way we look at the programs we run and inevitably makes e-mail campaigns more effective.

Over the last 18 months, digital technologies - including mobile, analytics, big data, social and cloud - have reached a tipping point with business executives. Analysts said there is no choice but to increase technology's potential in the enterprise, and this means evolving IT's strategies, priorities and plans beyond tending to the usual concerns as CIOs expect their 2013 IT budgets to be essentially flat for fifth straight year.

"The Institute's director, Dr. Michael Rappa, spoke today in Washington, DC with senior IT executives across Federal agencies and state government about the looming talent shortage in Big Data. The panel included Jeff Butler, Director, Research Databases, with the Internal Revenue Service and Micheline Casey, former Chief Data Officer, State of Colorado. This past summer Dr. Rappa served as academic co-chair of TechAmerica Foundation's Big Data Commission, which examined strategies for transforming government through the application of Big Data."

"Effective teamwork among an organization's top management makes employees happier and more productive, with positive benefits to the organization."

Executives expect that new digital tech will transform their businesses, but admit their companies are far from prepared. (via @McKinsey)

"CEOs are sometimes rewarded for taking excessive risks - a practice that helped fuel the recent recession but could be altered if companies are more strategic in how they compensate their chief executives, a Michigan State University scholar argues in a new study."

More and more executives are experimenting with open innovation initiatives. Stefan Lindegaard outlines some potential knock-on effects-both good and bad.

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.

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.

How important is Twitter in the political revolutions sweeping the Middle East? That was the topic of discussion on stage at the CTIA mobile and wireless convention today in Orlando, Florida and two very different, very strong opinions were voiced. "I don't think anyone in their right mind would say that sending a tweet is the equivalent of activism," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, "but it's another tool people can use." Kenneth Roth, executive director of of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's most respected human rights organization, framed things very differently though. He said on stage (above) that mobile technology in general would make it impossible today for something like Nazi Germany to unfold again the way it did historically.

What superficially looks like shifts in the technological capabilities are really transformations in how businesses organize and execute. The fifth shift in this case-after the mainframe, the departmental computer, the PC, and the Internet-I will reiterate is social business. I would say what it has changed is the base nature of how humans interact with each other. These other technologies are certainly fantastic innovations that will accelerate how we get or deliver messages. But consider this: having common languages across cultures certainly accelerated how we communicated with each other, but as we can still see, the real trick is the ability to convey meaning.

In Innovation Deep Dive, Lisa Strausfeld from Pentagram has contrasted the drivers and the impact of innovation of various countries by way of an interactive line ranking. The visualization uses quite a large set of different datasets, ranging from Gallup and business schools reports, to the usual suspects like the UNESCO and the World Bank. The interface requires some trial-and-error to get used to (e.g. the data categories at the top are clickable), but creates a compelling overview of how different nations actually perform versus how their business executives perceive the same issue.

Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

"No executive can afford to be a Luddite and dismiss all new media. Sometimes it's exactly the right way for you to spend your time (especially if you're "on the way up" and need to build your profile). But too many leaders dive in without thinking through the costs of social media (what else could you be doing with your time?). After all, in this crowded media landscape, sometimes what matters most isn't your use of 21st century technologies. Instead, it's the forgotten 19th century arts (handwritten notes, personal phone calls, and high-quality personal meetings) that can have the greatest impact." Dorie's article misses two important reasons that leaders might need to include social media as part of their activities: 1) Good leaders understand culture, and social media are an important part of culture 2) Good leaders understand media and their effects on how humans organize. Understanding, especially where media are concerned, is best gained through participation. If they were to take Dorie's advice, Napoleon probably wouldn't have read newspapers, Winston Churchill wouldn't have listened to radio, and JFK wouldn't have watched television.

Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO's company performs is the width of his face. CEOs with wider faces, like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, have better-performing companies than CEOs like Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers. That's the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.