SociaLens

American companies and organizations spend billions of dollars every year on leadership training for their managers. To improve job performance they ought instead to focus on what managers believe about their employees, a study by the University of California, Riverside shows.

Maeda acknowledges that he now understands that social media can only take you so far in redesigning leadership. All those great hopes for leading by blogging, tweeting, and emailing proved inadequate to the gritty business of persuading an actual living, breathing constituency to follow his direction.

As more shoppers arrive in stores with price and product data literally at their fingertips via smartphones, their interaction with sales associates - most still earning a risible $7-10 an hour in an era of $4-per-gallon gas - is more crucial than ever. A study conducted by the Verde Group and the Wharton School of Business found that the single most critical element in customer satisfaction was not billion-dollar branding, advertising or extensive use of social media, but the quality of those personal moments when a shopper chooses -or not - to become a paying customer.

Twitter Inc. is in advanced talks to buy TweetDeck Inc. for around $50 million, people familiar with the matter said.TweetDeck is one of the add-on programs that help Twitter users view and manage short messages carried by the service, which are known as tweets.

The customer-centered company needs to make its products interactive, train its people for co-creative dialogue, redesign its physical places for two-way interactions, and open up the architecture of its digital sites to other processes and content that the company doesn't control. Nike puts a sensor in its shoes that lets runners track their runs and has a web platform where exchange data with others. Starbucks encourages a dialogue across all its stakeholders through the highly popular mystarbucksidea.com website. 3M invites its B2B customersto co-create new products with its R&D people live in their corporate labs. Apple invites third parties to develop new applications for its iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Companies are generally unprepared for this transformation to experience co-creation. Most product development groups continue to design non-interactive products. Company people in call centers and company stores still generally follow company narratives. Most corporate IT departments and suppliers are trained in one-way project-management techniques incompatible with true engagement-platform development. Herein lies the transformational challenge customer experience managers will face as they become customer-experience co-creators.

Great case study of an intentionally-constructed company culture, including a course on improvisation, to promote better listening.

If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you'd have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better. The number of new editors registering on the site has grown from 60 on an typical day in 2004 (when the site was 3 years old) to now 1800 people joining English Wikipedia and making at least 1 edit in a given day today. Vandalism is way up but still makes up less than 25% of edits from new editors. 55% of first edits by new editors today meet the site's (increasingly) stringent quality controls and require no clean-up by other editors. While that's down from 72% in 2004, it's still pretty good.

This talk explores nine commonly held assumptions about how teens and young adults use technology. By applying nationally representative data, we'll unpack fact from fiction. Do teens really send that many text messages a day? Is Twitter the next big thing among young adults? Are landlines obsolete? Using data from surveys and focus groups from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, we will examine the changes in technology use among young people, and look at why it is important that we understand these trends, even if we're not young adults or parents of them ourselves

You've heard of paywalls but what about "like walls"? New Yorker magazine is mimicking the music industry by locking a new article on their Facebook Page and interested readers can only access the full article by clicking the "Like" button on the publication's Facebook Page. If you don't "like" it, you can only read the intro to Jonathan Franzen's lengthy article about visiting Alejandro Selkirk, the island where the book Robinson Crusoe was said to have been based. Once you "like" it, the entire article becomes available immediately. So far, more than 203,000 people have "liked" the Page. Earlier today, the count was closer to 200,000. Read more: http://www.futureofmediaevents.com/2011/04/11/to-read-jonathan-franzen-article-on-new-yorker-facebook-page-you-need-tolike-it/#ixzz1JEq1EOGo

For most people I meet, the phrase "social media" evokes post-2004 web technologies: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, … (The phrase came into widespread use around this time.) But since its earliest days, the internet has been a very social place.

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.

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.

Much of the TV, video, film and sport we watch is sponsored by a brand, a product, a corporation. But … why? With humor and persistence, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock dives into the hidden but influential world of brand marketing, on his quest to make a completely sponsored film about sponsorship. And yes, the onstage naming rights for talk were sponsored too. By whom and for how much? He'll tell you. 

A new report on young people's use of social networking and cyber safety reveals that young people may be more aware and better able to manage online risks than their parents commonly think.

When bad news needs to be shared, management scholars have shown that the response is influenced by how bad the news is, what is said, and who says it. New research by Terry Cobb, management associate professor in the Pamplin College of Business, focuses on what makes such communications effective or successful.

Customer-orientation and vision need to complement each other in order to stimulate breakthrough innovation. A visionary approach is essential to secure long-term success as well as to provide truly differentiating offerings to the market. However, this vision cannot be defined in a vacuum without customer insights. These insights are gained through shifts in focus from solutions to needs and broad understanding of customer's context, andmarket majorities to minorities, i.e. unserved consumers with dedicated needs.This leads me to the following conclusion: Innovation based on needs of edge customers tends to result in higher likelihood of breakthroughs than involving average customers in solution development. When it comes to breakthrough innovation, a customer-centered vision seems to be indicated.

The political debate in Wisconsin continues to heat up, and we're provided with another story which looks to stoke the flame. Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy (R), a newly appointed U.S Representative from Wisconsin's 7th district has caught the attention of the online world for a YouTube clip of a Polk County town hall meeting. Duffy was asked questions concerning his salary, and his answers have raised the eyebrows of many who have seen it. The story is of particular interest because after the clip was posted on YouTube, the Polk County GOP looked to take it down.

For the first time, more college students are using smart phones than traditional feature phones, reports a new study from Ball State University.

Scientists and engineers who produce innovative work aren't in it just for the money, according to researchers from Duke University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The king of Web corporations has been Google with its dominance of search. Recently, Facebook has become the second-most popular website. How do the purposes of each of these successful sites differ, and where do they compete?