• “Lots of followers” doesn’t necessarily equal “lots of engagement.” The list of the top 100 most-followed brands differs quite a bit from the list of the 25 most-engaged brands.
• “Posting a lot” doesn’t necessarily equal “lots of engagement,” either. The 25 brands with the greatest volume of tweets were not the same as the 25 most-engaged brands.
• What does lead to lots of engagement? Posting consistently. The two brands with the most consistent volume of content, #1 Notebook of Love and #2 Disneywords, were also the two most-engaged brands.
• Another factor in engagement is the type of content you tweet. Visuals rule the day here: more than three-fourths of the most-engaged brands’ content was photos. The second most popular type of content? Videos. Links and status updates made up a miniscule portion of their tweets.
• The day that the most-engaged brands were most likely to tweet was Wednesday, and the time of day when they were most likely to tweet was 4 p.m.

What do these findings mean to you? Should you start tweeting Wednesdays at 4 p.m. religiously? Not necessarily. What works on Twitter varies depending on your industry. However, this report provides lots of data you can use to compare yourself to your competition. In fact, if you go to smo.infinigraph.com, you can look up competitors in your industry and run a report to see what they’re doing on Twitter.

Ask yourself:

• What kinds of content are they tweeting, retweeting and sharing?
• What kinds of responses are they getting?
• How are they responding to followers’ tweets?
• What are they doing that you’re not doing?

As with most things in life, it’s not the quantity but the quality that counts. A well-planned, well-executed Twitter strategy works better than throwing a ton of tweets out in a frantic effort to be heard above the noise.

Part of quality is consistency. Your followers need to know what to expect, and that they can rely on you. Have you ever followed a Twitterer who started out strong and then disappeared? It’s better to start small and build from there than to start with a volume of tweets that you can’t maintain.

Keep in mind, too, that what works on Twitter will change over time, so following your competition and learning from what they do is the best way to stay on top of trends—and to modify your strategy so you can continue to grow your customer engagement.

What can you learn from the most engaged brands on Twitter? How can you improve your social media strategy to more successfully engage your customers?

Are you sure? If you do have them, are the safeguards up to date? Are they monitored and audited regularly? Is your staff compliant with the regulations and rules you have in place? Are your Business Associates compliant?

If you answered “no” or “I think so” to even one of the above questions, you could be putting your patient data at risk of a breach and your patients at risk of identity theft. And you’re not alone. In the past two years, 94% of healthcare organizations had at least one data breach, and 45% said they had more than five significant data breaches.

According to the final rule, you have until Sept. 23 to make sure your HIPAA house is in order. Per the rule, any impermissible use or disclosure of patient data is considered a data breach unless an official risk assessment concludes otherwise. It also extends requirements of the HIPAA privacy and security rules to organizations’ business associates, which are any people or companies that use or disclose protected health information on behalf of, or provide services to, a covered entity. This puts your organization on the spot – potentially with a HIPAA audit – to verify your business associates meet the requirements.

The right cloud partner can help you meet the HIPAA Sept 23^rd deadline

Often in-house IT professionals lack the resources to manage all of the security projects necessary to keep protected health information (PHI), including medical images, safe. Working with a cloud services provider to manage the bulk of the back-end security can be a cost-effective solution. However, while a cloud services provider can help shoulder some of the load, it is absolutely critical to choose the right cloud partner. PHI can actually be more secure in the healthcare cloud than on your local server if you work with a cloud provider that:

• Meets technology and procedure best-practices in support of HIPAA and HITECH requirements
• Agrees to a contract that specifies best-practice security and privacy policies, breach notification/support processes and data protection even upon termination of contract
• Demonstrates that its technologies and procedures are consistently updated, monitored and audited by a third-party
• Provides solutions to give your staff reliable and highly secure remote and mobile access that meets industry and regulatory requirements

Here’s an overview of the administrative, technical, and physical safeguards a full-service cloud services provider should be able to provide you with, in support of HIPAA and HITECH compliance:

• Risk analysis and roadmap. A HIPAA Security Rule risk assessment and roadmap showing what you need to improve and how to help achieve compliance.

• Physical security. Security policies that restrict physical access to the cloud services provider data center to authorized personnel; redundant back-up storage for PHI to support business and clinical continuity.

• Administrative security. Proof that authorized administrators of your data are current with security training, including HIPAA security training; auditing tools for you to monitor the cloud environment as desired.

• Technical security. Multiple layers of security technology, from network and firewall security to data encryption; mobile security features such as authentication/authorization, encryption and data “sanitation” to wipe data from stolen or missing devices.

You’re still the boss

Regardless of how much a cloud provider can support HIPAA and HITECH compliance on the back-end, it is still your organization’s responsibility to drive the bus. Do the risk assessment. Get familiar with the HIPAA and HITECH requirements. Know your business associates inside and out, and only work with those who can prove they have best-practice policies in place. The risk to your organization — both financial and professional — and to your patients is too great otherwise.

What steps have you taken to help ensure your healthcare organization is HIPAA and HITECH compliant? What is your biggest challenge?

As I drove back to the office with a clean bill of health, I thought about how a holistic approach could also solve some of the aches and pains felt by enterprise businesses today. One of these pain-points lies inside the data center where infrastructure, network, and applications all meet. System health monitoring is typically divided between these three groups.  But problems arise because each group has its own tools to monitor performance and none of these groups has final responsibility over end-user performance. The lack of accountability results in a loss of productivity for the enterprise business when systems are down or not functioning optimally.

I spoke to Joe McKinney from ADCom Solutions who has been working with IT professionals for over three decades.  He explained that many companies struggle with aligning resources to manage and troubleshoot across multiple IT silos.  When a problem occurs, a “pizza party” with the various teams is needed to solve it. While the meal is delicious, it pulls IT staff away from strategic CIO technology initiatives that are needed to keep the business competitive and relevant. McKinney’s firm suggests that clients should take a more holistic approach.   Managed Application Performance (MAP) is a new way to quickly isolate and mitigate the problems in the data center and vastly abbreviate the time it takes to fix them.

Here are three ways this approach could benefit your business:

1. Isolating the fault domain more quickly

By closely monitoring the entire system, small problems in any part of the IT stack are given proper attention.  A minor error in the network may not be reason for alarm, but when it is in conjunction with another alarm in the application, it poses a major impact to users. Holistic monitoring will quickly identify and fix the problem by alerting the right team. Before a bad IP routing address or line of code can cause a huge headache, Managed Application Performance brings the problem to its rightful owner to fix it in an orderly fashion By taking a holistic approach, Managed Application Performance allows companies to get the most out of the tools they have invested in even in this day and age of constrained resources.

2. More meaningful reporting

Most tool sets have vast reporting capabilities. But lack of resources and trained expertise prevents the data from making it to the executive’s desks.  The problem is further complicated by the fact that no one tool set exists to show the overall health readings. There have been ‘manager of manager’ systems on the market for years such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli, but they do not poll the user experience in an end-to-end manner and require trained staff to implement and operate. A managed holistic approach to monitoring does two things. It provides a regular and meaningful dashboard of the end-user experience and it provides correlative information to predict and proactively fix impending performance problems.  Legacy reporting metrics include system availability and uptime.  While these are intrinsically significant, an available system isn’t always usable by the end-user or customer.  Managed Application Performance creates of more meaningful metrics around whether an internal user can do their work or whether customers can purchase products on the ebusiness site.

3. Transforming the business

Kesha McDade, technical service director for AT&T in Richardson, Texas told me that she has seen a lot of interest in Managed Application Performance, especially from customers who are deploying transformational technologies such as new ERP, UC or VoIP systems. This is because customers lack a single point of contact that manages and troubleshoots across all the different silos.  Consider the following: when moving from a TDM to a VoIP platform the voice will now ride on the data backbone and call patterns will change from distributed PBX model to a much more centralized call-controller environment.  These two variables can be tricky, and there is only one shot to make a conversion like this work. Having end-to-end monitoring tools and reports is in high-demand when a business is transforming these mission critical applications.

Lack of resources and fragmented monitoring tool sets are common problems today for over-stretched IT departments. How is your company coping in this environment? Have you considered or implemented a holistic Managed Application Performance service to get the most from your investment in performance tools?

A rose by any other name

What is an application, really? To misquote Shakespeare “that which we call an application, by any other name would still process input.” In other words, all applications are made up of processes that take input from a user and produce output or results. Traditionally PCs or laptops ran these applications, but what if an application runs remotely on a server with access via a browser? Is it still an application? Many “apps” on a mobile device merely access the web version of an application, prompting heated discussions. Is it still an app if it’s nothing more than a web browser accessing a website? The easiest way to decide is to ask the same question we did above.

What’s an app, Doc?

An application is merely one or more processes that take input and spits out results. Where the application runs doesn’t change this definition, though it may add an adjective or two to the description. We might call them “remote apps” or “client/server apps” to properly describe where it lives. But if it takes input and produces output it must be an application.

On your desktop, you click an application and it opens a window. The OS handles this request as a way to provide input into the application. The same is true on a mobile device, but on these devices the application could also be a window produced by a web browser masquerading as traditional app. Aside from lost connectivity or reduced functionality due to the mobile device, running your apps in the cloud has many advantages, the least of which is data security and redundancy. Quibbling over the window into the service is like arguing that the drive through doesn’t qualify as eating at the restaurant.

The more things change

All we’ve done is move the kitchen further back from the drive-thru window. Food is still prepared and packaged the way it always was, but the way you order becomes enhanced. The window can live on your home PC or your mobile tablet, but the food and consumption is still just as real regardless of how you received it.

The damage and resulting distrust come from the early attempts at cloud services. They spoke of the cloud as if it were something more (or less) than it was. The marketing made it seem almost magical when in fact it was simple evolution of a service model. As the capabilities of these platforms grow, we’ll see more complex Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions offered to solve every business need. And SaaS seems to be hitting the spot for many companies  as the adoption rate climbs.

Bon appetit!

Now the cloud is the kitchen and the drive-thru window is the device. Basically, the same product or service is still being delivered. The real “art” is in how the application improves or enhances the process.

Has the cloud has improved the delivery of applications in your company? What are some of the obstacles you have encountered? How have they been overcome?

Why am I giving you  all of this horrible imagery about my house that I am now probably paying more for that it is worth and what does my pink house have to do with your network? Well, I’ll tell you.

Consider the outdated network

I bought this house because the good outweighed the bad. You did the same with your voice and data network. In addition, through business changes, you may have consolidated with other companies or locations that don’t work so perfectly with what you have. In other words -the equivalent of a pink kitchen.  It may work but you have a vision for something better.

So what do you do?

If you are lucky, you have a big budget and will just go ahead and tear everything out and remodel your network to make it look like the network equivalent of the kitchen of your dreams, complete with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops.

But if your budget is not so big, there are too many variables to make infrastructure changes all at once.  You have to consider what your company wants and needs, what your clients demand, and the technology changes that we are seeing in communications. It’s a little overwhelming.

Upgrade a little at a time

If your voice network has a pink kitchen, that cosmetic change could mean adding an easy value-add service to your business such as IP Toll Free that enhances what you are using, but you don’t have to make significant changes to incorporate it. Or add VPN to your data network and allow business to take place practically anywhere you want. In other words, make a change that works with what you have and takes you into the future.

Next thing was to eradicate the pink floor. This was a little more expensive so I had to save for it and really think about it. I mean, you don’t want to replace pink with equally soon to be outdated – green, or you will be resigned to constantly making changes.

Once you pick your protocol and platform, think of your core network as the foundation of the rest of your communications. The tricky part is to invest in something that is going to last. I had to look at the trends, just like you do with your network.  If you are still using PBX and PRI trunks for voice, you might want to take a good look at SIP trunking. It is a great foundation in that it is easier to manage your service, you can get more bandwidth and functionality, and like a good foundation, it is the platform for many other applications such as unified communications and a fully integrated network.  Same goes for data. If you haven’t already done so, a move to MPLS or Ethernet will take you well into the future.

Go for impact

When you make changes to your network, try to focus on where you can make the most impact and how that can be an investment and not just a change. Every time you touch your network, it should be to improve it and not just maintain it.

When you are upgrading, it isn’t always like for like. With the changes in technology, you want to look at how traffic is flowing through your whole network.  Look for where potential bottlenecks are in your servers and when you expand, keep disaster recovery in mind so that you can care for both things at once.  Also, if you can consolidate traffic, that will help as well.

Finally, after years of patiently making upgrades to my pink kitchen, the pink is gone. I wasn’t visionary or even methodical in updating the kitchen; yet slowly, I was able to transform it into a modern, efficient space with nice countertops and a normal stainless steel sink.

Are you slowly upgrading your existing network? What changes have worked out well? What advice would you give others who are gradually “remodeling” to incorporate the latest technologies and trends?

I’ll make a blanket statement and say that we all take technology, in one form or another, for granted. It is not until we are without it that we realize what an important role it plays in our daily lives.

As recently as just a couple years ago, a computer crash would have completely prohibited a productive work day, but with BYOD and the cloud, my computer problems didn’t mean the equivalent of  taking a sick day.

Over a twenty-four hour period, without my main computer, there is really very little that I wasn’t able to accomplish from a work perspective.  Other than having my frequently accessed documents locally saved on my desktop and the ability to edit a full range of documents everything was at my fingertips on my smartphone or tablet, thanks to the cloud and mobility.

A mobile-friendly IT policy

What does all this mean?  Think mobile for all aspects of your organization.  How would your organization respond if their computer crashed for the day?  Or a week?  Could you still be effective?  Could you still serve your clients or perform your core competencies.  If the answer is no, you should start to reevaluate the role mobile plays in your daily activities.

In my opinion, a few necessary components should be implemented for a mobile progressive organization.  Now remember, these are all things mobile:

• Strategy – Determine why you are introducing or supporting the mobile initiative.  i.e. how is it going to better the organization?
• Center of excellence – Who in your organization should influence your policy?  And what does it look like?
• Device, application, and content management solution – Do not think just about the device, consider the application and content also.  And while I mention apps and content, don’t overlook enterprise application stores.  They are becoming relevant and necessary very quickly.
• Application development – Consider creating applications that are just as intuitive away from the office as if your workforce was behind their computer.  What you’ll find is these apps can offer a better user experience than your traditional back office application.
• Professional services – They can be internal or external resources but mobility requires a dedicated resources and mindshare to handle new requests, existing deployments, and next generation projects

So, my questions to you are:  What do you most miss the most when you don’t have your computer?  And is it something that if you proactively plan for could be accomplished via a mobile device?

1. OpenStack
2. VMware vCloud
3. CloudStack
4. Eucalyptus
5. Microsoft Cloud OS
6. Google Cloud Platform

This diagram shows relationships between the leading cloud platforms and public cloud service providers:

Once a customer selects a cloud platform, a private cloud can be deployed behind the enterprise’s firewall or by a service provider via an offsite, hosted service then a public cloud service provider can be selected that supports that particular cloud platform. For example, if OpenStack is the cloud platform of choice, a customer can choose among public cloud service providers like AT&T, Dell, HP, or Rackspace.

5 observations and predictions

So what’s next for the hybrid cloud? After following this developing market with great interest, I’d like to offer several observations and predictions about the industry:

1. OpenStack is the mindshare leader in the open source / open standards hybrid cloud space. Here’s why:

Momentum - Contributors include major industry players like Ericsson, IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat, Nebula, Cloudscaling, Piston Cloud, Ubuntu, AT&T, Nimbula (Oracle), SoftLayer, SUSE, Cisco, and VMware. As a result, there are many OpenStack solutions to choose from already.

Wide Adoption – Rackspace, which distributes and is a founding member of OpenStack, has moved aggressively into hybrid cloud, with customers like HubSpot , and partners like Persistent Systems.

Growth – OpenStack has over 900 job postings.

Vision – OpenStack has made interoperability, or “no vendor lock-in,” an essential feature.

Its recent announcement of a global cloud network is proof. Plus, Cloudscaling is offering an OpenStack cloud that can burst into Amazon or Google public clouds.

Prediction - OpenNebula, the open source cloud platform founded in Europe, joins the OpenStack Foundation. OpenStack strengthens its European presence. See Cloud Watch for more information.

2. VMware strengthens its vCloud message and markets its own public cloud to expand its proprietary, hybrid cloud solution — leveraging thousands of ESX customers.

3. CloudStack grows and seeks more public cloud partners, in addition to Terremark. Prediction – CloudStack establishes a closer, more strategic relationship with AWS to compete more effectively in hybrid clouds.

4. Eucalyptus merges with AWS. Prediction – In support of its new $600 million, ten-year CIA contract, AWS purchases Eucalyptus to expand aggressively into enterprise hybrid cloud solutions.

5. Microsoft Cloud OS /Azure IaaS, founded on Windows Server and Windows Azure, is successful.

We’d like to hear from you. Will OpenStack maintain its impressive momentum? Do you believe that CloudStack will make an alliance with AWS? How will Google fare in the enterprise hybrid cloud space? What does this mean for your business? We look forward to your comments.

Increasingly, the world of mobile is focused on apps. The enterprise market has finally caught app fever. Andrew Dailey from MGI research moderated a panel that included experts from across the industry. Executives from Airwatch, Appcelerator, AnyPresence, MobileIron, SAP Labs, and SOASTA were present to provide commentary on how “Mobile App Development Meets the Cloud.”

I believe these two trends are fundamentally tied at the hip.  Cloud computing compliments mobile development by providing easy and scalable methods for application development and testing. Today, entire application development platforms can also be purchased in the cloud.

While there were numerous insights from the panel, I found the discussion on designing applications to be particularly insightful. Many enterprise customers are building mobile apps, but these companies are using concepts that worked in the PC era. The next generation of app development is particularly challenging for enterprise application design. In the consumer world, software companies built micro apps that performed one of two functions flawlessly. These applications could remain micro applications or the application developer could build additional functionality based on reviews and requests.

Consumer applications are upgraded frequently based on user feedback, a change in the version of an operating system or a change in design tools. Applications are rarely considered finished. Iterative design is norm for consumer applications. In fact, there’s even the concept of a disposable app in the consumer landscape. Tom Lounibos, the CEO of Soasta, discussed how a company built an application to launch a product. The application lasted for only 24 hours, but Soasta said the company believed it was worth building to support product sales.

Most of these concepts haven’t translated into enterprise mobile application design today. Enterprise designers want to build applications that are feature rich and will last many years. In fact, many of our existing enterprise applications took years to customize and deploy. In the cloud, applications can be updated daily. In enterprise IT, it could take up to 6 months or more to get an application updated. Consumer applications were adopted because these applications are easy to use and solved a need or desire. Consumers continue to use an application if the company fixes issues quickly and adds new features that are requested.

The question a developer should ask itself as he/she builds employee-facing applications is simple. What functions or workflows would the employee need or want to use on a mobile device? What single function would allow an employee to get the job done faster or easier? Start there.

I personally believe mobile application design represents the new era of application design.

What’s in the new era? First, the post PC application landscape will offer fewer features within an application. While it’s nice to have 500 functions within an application, enterprise applications are frequently cluttered, clunky, and unusable. New applications won’t be designed to support every use case.

Second, applications will be built with iteration in mind. Like consumer applications, developers will constantly add features and upgrade applications from microapps to richer mobile applications.

Third, some applications should be designed with obsolescence in mind. Today enterprise software is expected to last five to ten years because it runs our business. Many new mobile applications will be designed with a shorter lifespan in mind to support a specific line of business goal. For example, marketing could launch an app to support a product launch, sales could request a special catalog for the Christmas season, and field service could build an application to support construction for one project. Being a mobile first company requires new thinking around the design of both the applications and the business processes to support mobile.

What’s your greatest challenge with mobile application design today?

Most of IT is trying to connect the dots in developing DIY policies; meanwhile, smartphones are exploding with new features and services. The in-house DIY strategy concept has created sleepless nights for the IT department. And organizations see ever-growing requirements to be better and faster at access control, compliance and self-governance, as well as policy deployment and enforcement.

Do you want to regain the control? Register Now.

Join industry analysts from ABI Research and International Data Corporation (IDC) at an AT&T mobility roadshow to better understand best practices for building a successful mobile strategy, including BYOD.

• Is your organization challenged with implementing a BYOD strategy?
• Are your mobile devices and applications really secured?
• What are the key mobile components for building a progressive organization?

These topics and more will be addressed at cities near you.

Sign up today and learn firsthand how you can propel your company to the next level of success using mobility.

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This of course plays into the fears of executives who do not understand the value of social media nor its place in our modern society. “We can’t respond to them,” I hear executives declare. “If we do, we’ll invite more complaints and questions,” they’ll contend in defense of their position.

This isn’t as uncommon as you might think. I recently presented at a corporate conference where I received a question from someone in the C-Suite that gave me pause. The question went something like this, “Customers will complain on social media because it’s a natural thing to do. We know more people will say negative things than they will share positive experiences. What’s a company to do? What’s the point? How do we change behavior?”

The future of branding is shared experiences

The reality is that people will share their experiences at every step of the customer journey and throughout the customer lifecycle. In every moment of truth, touch points open and close and it is what they ask and find in each moments that decides the fate of their decision and your place within it. Among connected customers, websites may or may not play a role in providing guidance to prospects or resolution to existing customers. What will factor into every moment of truth however are the shared experiences of their peers and those who appear in blogs, review sites, communities, YouTube, and in the responses during real-time engagement across social networks and customer-facing apps.

The expressions that come back in those moments represent the real world, and they’re only amplifying in volume and magnitude. See, those experiences don’t disappear. They stay online forming a collective repository where expressions shape impressions. People trust experiences of their peers, whether good or bad, and without your engagement, you are the victim of a digital game of grapevine. Perception is reality. This is why now is the time to take part in shaping the experiences your want people to have and share. And, that takes an investment.

So how do we change behavior?

It starts by changing our behavior first.

Become the change you wish to see

Customers don’t’ see the roles and functions that define a business. They see one brand and therefore everyone who touches the customer must work together to deliver a consistent experience. When it comes to social media, customers are for the most part, only getting a glimpse of the brand, usually the lens of the marketing or communications department. This assumes that customers only want to connect for marketing or entertainment purposes. When you consider the multiple dimensions of the customer lifecycle and the expectations in each moment of truth, businesses are rather antisocial in their social media approach. It’s rather absurd that businesses think that social media is yet another channel for traditional marketing guised in a social promise of engagement and transparency.

Changing behavior takes understanding

We know that customers take to social media to share experiences for a variety of reasons:

• Because they can.
• Becase it’s cathartic and validating.
• Because social media tests and rebuilds relationships.

So if companies aren’t investing in cultivating positive experiences, they are by default investing the active exchange of grievances and speculation.

According to a recent report published by SimplyMeasured, almost 99 percent of businesses in the Interbrand Top 100 Brands maintain a social media presence on Twitter. Yet, only 30 percent have a dedicated customer service handle.

Among the top 10 brands as measured by engagement, with dedicated customer service handles, response times ranged from 40 minutes to 20 hours.

Yes it’s a new expense. Yes it’s different. But we know that it works. Improving the quality and quantity of “word of mouth” starts with changing perceptions. Martiz and Evolve24 found that when people seeking help or expression discontent were engaged on Twitter by the brand, 32 percent and 51.5 percent loved it or liked it respectively. Of course they did! And you know what? It changed how they feel in that moment and over time.

A Risk-averse leadership leads to a complacent market

Does engaging customers on Twitter invite more complaints? Hardly. Research shows that people take to social networks to vent because their attempts at seeking resolution through traditional channels already failed. People are seeking solutions; if not from you, from anyone.

Shared experiences are powerful and they don’t always have to be negative. The solution is positive reinforcement or positive conditioning. People are busy. They ask questions or voice frustration in the moment because there’s usually something in it for them. The same could be true for positive reinforcement. If you want people to share their honest experiences, and you believe them to be true, then you must proactively foster the behavior you wish to see.

Positive reinforcement applies rewards to induce or encourage desired behavior. To work, it must be individualized and then promoted to greater audiences to demonstrate your good work.

Earning good “carma”

When Ford launched its 2013 Fusion, it understood that people would share both praise and displeasure. However, the company believed that in order to incite social acclaim and positive experiences, it would need to proactively invite and reward the desired behavior. To do so, Ford introduced “Random Acts of Fusion” to thank fans for essentially saying nice things.

From customized “thank you” baskets to pop-up car washes to test drives to having comedian Reggie Watts remix customer Tweets, Ford was loud and clear in its intentions. As evidenced by its hashtag, #backatyou, people were at the center of this campaign and reciprocity was the takeaway. Ford’s random acts of kindness weren’t really random at all. Everything was not only cleverly planned but also promoted across social media far and wide. The company found that in addition to expanded reach and priceless PR as a result, positive conditioning works. And over time, Ford’s continued investment in positive engagement will eventually contribute to a more meaningful, co-created brand where people and their experiences define what the blue oval means to them and their peers.

Behavior change is just the beginning. If you want people to share positive experiences and accolades, you have to intentionally invite and reward them to do so. Additionally you must alter the negative experiences of those in need. The old adage, you reap the seeds you sow, has never been truer. In a social economy, happy customers will tell a few, and unhappy customers will tell thousands. It’s up to you, your imagination, and your intentions to shift the balance and change the equation to your benefit now and over time.

The future of business isn’t created, it’s co-created. #backatyou