What do you get when you cross classic strategy frameworks with a start-up?

* This is a guest post from Bryan Tookey, UK MD of social media monitoring company Brandwatch who also tweets here

What do you get when you cross classic strategy frameworks with a start-up? Paralysing indecision. This rather depressing conclusion came to me two years into my role as the COO of our company, a start-up that has been booming in the social media monitoring sector.

I was confident I could help frame and direct the company’s strategy, having spent six years as a strategic consultant at McKinsey and then four years with strategically minded jobs at Google and Ask.com (two companies with very different strategic needs). Continue reading →

Social CRM: Stop thinking about ownership and start thinking about culture change

Who owns Social CRM? This debate continues to divide opinion, but I believe it is the wrong question. Ownership is not the issue, and only echoes the ‘who owns social media’ tedium, which I have ranted about for longer than I care to remember.

The social media ownership debate has been perpetuated by a range of marketing and communications agencies with the objective of grabbing budget from each other and squabbling over whose social services are ‘better’. Continue reading →

Is social capital the new currency or a pile of Somaliland shillings?

Last summer I had an adventure and flew to Addis Ababa from Mumbai and then travelled through Ethiopia on African buses to the Red Sea and spent a week in Somaliland on the way. Right up there with the best of life.

I had to hire a soldier for $15 per day, had a few problems with child-soldiers off their tits on qat (a masticated opiate), saw amazing cave drawings at Las Keel, nearly lost a finger when ‘my’ soldier macheted a fruit melon and had my first ‘dry-swim’ in the Gulf of Aden, in temperatures of 50°C. Continue reading →