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When corporations engage with communities, many make the mistake of focusing first on what the community can do for them. I encourage companies not to start with the benefit they get from the community (buy my stuff! design my products! give me feedback!), but instead with the benefits they give
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It has been a while since I wrote an original post on this blog, so I thought over the next few months I'd try to make up for lost time by previewing some of the concepts from my new book The Ad-Free Brand: Secrets to Successful Brand
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One of my favorite regular blog subjects is how to use community-based strategies to build brands. In fact, I'm putting the finishing touches on a new book entitled The Ad-Free Brand: Secrets to Successful Brand Positioning in a Digital World which will be out this August
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Last week, Google Senior Vice President of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg resigned after almost 10 years at the firm. While the comings and goings of tech industry executives aren’t typically that interesting to me, I found this news fascinating for a couple of reasons. First, Rosenberg says that one
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I’m passionate about helping organizations develop more authentic, meaningful, and productive relationships with the communities around them. Last week, I suggested a few ideas for how to begin thinking about a less self-centered approach to community strategy that might help. The evening after I wrote the post, I
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Who is in your community? It seems like such a simple question.In reality, your organization probably doesn’t just interact with one community, but a whole host of very different communities and sub-communities. The only thing these communities may share is that they are made up of individual
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March madness and the spirit of the NCAA basketball tournament are everywhere. But there’s one particular bracket no one wants to be on. For the past six years, the website Consumerist has held a tournament for readers to decide the Worst Company in America.The site takes nominations to
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The Open Source Observatory flashed an eye-popping headline last week: “Moving to open source would save [The Netherlands] government one to four billion [euro].” I had hoped I could do the dirty work of going over the report in fine detail and give you the summary, but there are
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B Lab, the organization behind the growing community of B Corporations (companies using the power of business to solve social and environmental problems) or B Corps for short, recently released its 2011 annual report.The report highlights some interesting progress over the last year, including a 75% increase in the
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This week, the folks at the Management Innovation Exchange announced a new project called the Hackathon Pilot. The idea of this pilot is to test out a collaborative approach to building the source code of management, with people working together on hacks and stories using online collaboration tools.I'
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"A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”Those were the words of James Madison in 1822, repeated in a letter dated February 25 to Librarian of Congress James Billington. The letter
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Since I've recently been on one of my Tom Sawyer rants again about the lack of humility I see in many community efforts, I thought I'd share a story that might help you visualize the role your organization could play in the communities it belongs to.