Business Improvement and Social media

The vast majority of humans throughout history worked because they had to. Many found comfort, value, and meaning in their efforts, but some defined work as a necessity to be avoided if possible. For centuries, elites in societies from Europe to Asia aspired to absolution from gainful employment. Aristotle defined a “man in freedom” as the pinnacle of human existence, an individual freed of any concern for the necessities of life and with nearly complete personal agency. (Tellingly, he did not define wealthy merchants as free to the extent that their minds were pre-occupied with acquisition.)

The promise of AI and automation raises new questions about the role of work in our lives. Most of us will remain focused for decades to come on activities of physical or financial production, but as technology provides services and goods at ever-lower cost, human beings will be compelled to discover new roles — roles that aren’t necessarily tied to how we conceive of work today.

Content Marketing Is Key
Important post from Scoop.it CEO @Guillaume Decugis because the 12 step program he outlines clearly cleaves content marketing pros from everyone else. We share this post in our Design Revolution Scoop.it feed because we would add 2 more items to a solid list:

13. You aren't designing for content curation and content marketing. 14. You are building community in

Designing for content curation means incorporating the automated feeds Guilluame discusses and leaving room for community and collaboration.  

Community's pillars such as user profiles, timeliens, following, comments, wikis and blogging have to be fuilt into a design or you are talking to yourself about yourself even if you follow many of Guillaume edicts. Guillaume's 12 Step Progam: 

1. You’re not tracking your results.

2. You’re not repurposing your content.

3. You aren’t automating at least part of your social media activity.

4. You aren’t automating some of your email marketing.

5. You’re only sharing your own content – you’re not adding any content curation to the mix.

6. You aren’t testing.

7. You don’t have a content strategy that’s tied to business goals and your buyers’ journey.

8. You haven’t defined your buyers’ personas or their typical journey.

9. You aren’t creating content strategically.

10. You don’t have a centralized “vault” of all your company’s content assets.

11. You aren’t promoting your content, either via social sharing or by making it visible to the search engines.

12. You have nothing to show for your work.

Rapid technological advances in digitization and data and analytics have been reshaping the business landscape, supercharging performance, and enabling the emergence of new business innovations and new forms of competition.

At the same time, the technology itself continues to evolve, bringing new waves of advances in robotics, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), and especially machine learning. Together they amount to a step change in technical capabilities that could have profound implications for business, for the economy, and more broadly, for society.