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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.

Very useful thinking about social media ROI. In my experience with business analytics, the "last mile" tends to be the toughest--getting the stakeholders to use metrics to make actual decisions. 

Businesses who focus on numbers can easily end up privileging short-term profits over long-term sustainability, employee productivity over engagement, and exploitation rather than innovation. These actions can end undermine the organizational strategy, and even the overall mission. Rather than serving as the ends-what the business is all about-the numbers (and qualitative metrics as well) need to be used as a means to measure of how well the organization is achieving both its short-term and long-term strategic goals, and ultimately how well the mission is being accomplished.

Should you start Eric Decker or Demaryius Thomas? Those types of decisions, if made during the work day, could cost employers $6.5 billion in lost productivity, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

A UX strategy has four primary components: Where are you now? Define the value you're delivering to your users today, identify known issues, and explore ways your product can realize what the business hopes to achieve. Where do you want to be? Specify the purpose of what you're building and what needs it will address. Identify opportunities to enhance your product and the guiding principles that will inform product design decisions. Explore all phases of a user's interaction with your product to identify how all product components will fit together. How will you get there? Plan the development of your product to accommodate continual enhancements while maintaining cohesion across the experience. Translate your plan into tangible requirements. How will you measure success? Define what success looks like for your product and what methods will be used to validate your product's success.

On Friday, I instigated a call to help a friend of mine in New Zealand. What I asked for was not money, and not much time, really; rather, I asked for people to record a short message (20 seconds max) in support of the people in Christchurch who have suffered so much from the earthquakes that have plagued their wonderful city. How this story is supposed to end is this: hundreds of thousands of people heard my plea for help, and overwhelmed my server with messages of hope. The number of messages and the outpouring of passion and love for this cause brought the Interwebs to its knees. The people of New Zealand clung to those messages of hope - and another social media legend was born. This did not happen.