Originally posted on huffingtonpost.com.
Corporate social responsibility looks a whole lot different now than it did a few years ago. Back then, the emphasis was on responsibility—look at all the good things we’re doing!—and on corporate, since so much of its DNA was based on business practices and funded by corporate largess. Lavish one-off benefit events with five-figure price tags paid for by sponsors such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers? That feels as 2007 as that bright, shiny new skyscraper [...]

Originally posted on huffingtonpost.com.
The inaugural One Young World summit that concluded on Wednesday in London wasn’t just a gathering of hundreds of tomorrow’s world leaders. Don’t get me wrong: The energy of the more than 600 delegates from 100-plus countries, the passion of their debates and the progress that their resolutions made toward finding solutions to problems such as economic injustice, climate change and excessive corporate power were all substantial and meaningful.
But the leadership summit wasn’t just about the delegates [...]

Originally posted on huffingtonpost.com.
Every generation assumes it has been handed the world’s problems because the one that preceded it didn’t quite master the agenda. In the rebellious 1960s, the baby boomers demonstrated noisily against established powers and ideas. But in the case of today’s energetic and engaged 20-somethings—the Real-Time Generation—I think assuming responsibility isn’t as much about disappointment in prior leadership (although there’s certainly cause for that) as it is about the power of the new tools. Thanks to the [...]

I’ve been talking for years about how we’re all living online. But as Paul Briand, who writes the “Baby Boomer Examiner” column for Examiner.com, points out, we aren’t just living online but also dying online.
Let me explain. I’m talking about obituaries, and here’s why: A new study from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University warns newspapers to “adapt to changes in audience behavior and technology that will alter the way Americans memorialize the dead. Already, interactive memorial pages [...]

This is the third in a series of three.
My last two posts addressed social media, present and future. The social media thought leaders we spoke with also had some notions about the social Web’s global impact:
George Gallate, global chairman, Euro RSCG 4D:
“Social media has made fundamental changes to the community. Huge effect on children all around the world.”

This is the second in a series of three.
In my last post, I shared some of what social media thought leaders have to say about the state of the social Web now. Here are their predictions for the future:
B.L. Ochman, president, Whatsnextonline.com:
“I think in the next five years, we’ll see a lot of companies get on the train or they’ll be left behind.… Companies will fall off the map when they refuse to be involved with what’s going on around [...]

This is the first in a series of three.
We just finished conducting one-on-one interviews with some of the brightest minds in the social Web. Here are some of their insights, which we shared with our general managers yesterday in Paris. Check in tomorrow for more of what these leaders have to say.
B.L. Ochman, president, Whatsnextonline.com:
“For big corporations, this stuff is still very scary…. Anyone who is a consultant must tackle fear.”
“A lot of companies should take their websites down, because [...]

You can have all the bandwidth in the world, a site loaded with bells and whistles, apps that run on every new platform—but that’s no guarantee of social media success. This point was brought home to me at the Internet Marketing Summit in London last week, during a presentation given by Andrew Gerrard, a social and digital media strategist at d-marketing.
The No. 1 social media tool companies should invest in is their people.
By now, we all know the buzzwords of [...]

As I’ve been traveling and researching the ways people socialize online around the world, I’ve been interested in the differences in users’ attitudes and behaviors. This is a case where the old adage “Think globally, act locally” rings true. It’s not just about various venues for social networking (for instance, Facebook in the U.S. versus Orkut most everywhere else); it’s about fundamentally different expectations and approaches to navigating the social Web.
As British tech-trendspotter Tom Smith put it in a presentation [...]

In the PR business, we’re all constantly thinking about social marketing, social networks, the social Web and social media. But we don’t think as often as we should about what those terms actually mean. Where does one end and another begin?
As Trebor Scholz, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study at the New School, lays out in an info-packed online slide show, the roots of our collective digital society are long and tangled: from an e-mail progenitor in 1965, [...]