Social media

As Facebook has grown to more than 600 million users, many companies have been struggling to figure out how to leverage it to help their businesses. Most have limited themselves to advertising or establishing company pages on the platform only to discover that while these methods allow them to engage their Facebook fans in a […]

How does a customer-service expert in Seattle catch the attention of a hot San Francisco startup in San Francisco, 700 miles away? The answer these days is likely to involve networking and brand-building on social media’s “fun” sites — even the ones best known for their tweets, pokes and cat videos. It’s been obvious since […]

As commercials migrate from television to the Internet, marketers need to use different techniques to keep viewers watching--and to encourage them to...

Are you in control of your content experience?

Contrary to popular belief, social media is not naturally more resistant to marketing tricks. It can be gamed. On Twitter, services exist to boost your follower count and give the impression that you’ve got a vast high-quality network. Bloggers can write articles rich with links that draw the attention of others who would hopefully link […]

"Create a social media presence that highlights your expertise," I told a room full of entrepreneurs. "And that will do more to drive business to your...

As a matter of policy, we don’t review our own books, but we hope you will. Keep an eye out for the following Press titles in September, and let us know what you think of them in the comments. Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business by Josh Bernoff and Ted […]

Board members need to understand the factors that impact their businesses. Economics, politics, and sector shifts are all vital issues on the agenda in the boardroom. But the agenda needs to keep pace with what is influencing business, and amongst the things that board members need to fully appreciate is the growing influence and power […]

They’re not the same thing.

Tips for turning them into real connections.

In the juiciest political sex scandals, revelations of hypocrisy are often the chief source of glee. There's nothing quite like discovering that a representative...

Entrepreneurs are turning Instagram into an e-commerce platform.

The internet runs on trading personal data for free services - and we can't figure out if it's a fair trade until we acknowledge that.

And why your company can’t ignore it.

Yes, you need quality. But you also need quantity.

(I wrote this post with Diamond CTO Chris Curran) Are you taking no more than a squirt gun to the talent wars? Most people find jobs through social connections. In 1974, Harvard sociologist Mark Granovetter published his landmark study that showed four out of five people find jobs through personal connections. Yet, in our recent […]

In the latest issue of Business Week, Stephen Baker's article "Beware Social Media Snake Oil" makes a provocative argument. He claims that all the hype...

(Editors' note: Follow all of HBR.org's Davos reports) This morning at Davos I presented the top CEO study we unveiled in the January/February issue of...

Last night's post-Stanley Cup riots left me disappointed in my community. Not my local community in Vancouver: after a decade living here, I can no longer...

Did Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook friending because he was unable to make friends? That’s the main theme of the hit film The Social Network. Zuckerberg didn’t care about money, several say; he was compensating for a lack of friends. Did Evan Williams, who just stepped aside as CEO of Twitter, jump on the bandwagon of […]