I had a disagreement with a scientist the other day. It was a classic disagreement between vision and reality. The scientist, strongly passionate about his product, saw a huge gap in the market and implicitly believed his solution would disrupt the market and would change the way people do things....

I stumbled onto Tumblr the other day and I browsed the content. It was mostly teen content, reblogs of jokes, inspiring sayings and images, weird videos etc. Most of it seemed harmless enough but once I dug deeper I became more disturbed.

One girl wrote of the pressure she...

I am a huge consumer of chocolate. It's not a holiday thing -- it's an addiction. During the holidays, however, it's an excuse to buy more than we actually need. Lately, however, my venture into the topic of Fair Trade within the chocolate industry has brought to light an increased...

One of the most powerful videos of 2012, "Gangnam Style," was released in July 2012. On December 21, 2012, according to Wikipedia "Gangnam Style" became the first online video to record a billion hits. As of January 6, 2013, the music video has been viewed over...

I had several meetings recently with friends from "traditional and emerging digital agencies." Where digital ad models have evolved from banner to engagement ads, and targeting has becoming increasingly sophisticated, and where paid search and SEO are getting less and less buzz, there is a fundamental shift happening that can...

Content has changed marketing forever. The continuous drone of social media strategists warning marketers to provide more customer value that moves away from me-me-me messages about the company has made traditional marketers rethink the message and approach to gain increased consumer mindshare.

Marketers are used to focusing on the...

Efficiency. Agility. The new competitive advantage. The conditions of increasingly networked markets, the pummelling volume of unstructured discussions, plus an increasingly unstable global economy are forcing companies to adapt quickly with less resources. What complicates this is the increasing reliance on extracting meaning from the real-time information and applying "rapid-learning"...

It's around the corner and businesses do not realize what they need to do to mobilize for the impending impact of Big Data. The wealth of information that's out there is forcing companies to rethink strategies how to adapt processes to the dynamic nature of the pedabytes of incoming data,...

I had the distinct honour of speaking ForumCon in San Francisco earlier this summer. This one-day event was dedicated to providing online forum owners with tips/tools and best practices for managing, growing and monetizing their forums.

An online forum, one of the earliest and purest forms of social networking,...

I had the pleasure of attending a recent Social Business Summit presented by the Dachis Group in New York.

The experience provided me access to some pretty forward-thinking professionals intent on building the next phase of Social Enterprise. The case examples from IBM, Newscorp, Harvard and even FoxNews...

Last weekend was a doozy. It never occurred to me, until some recent events, how wary we have to be about our online presence.

We trust our friends-online and offline... We post snippets of our daily lives online, never really thinking of how this could be used against us....We...

If you ever had the chance to do something really cool and were given the chance to create real change, would you do it? If this had some impact on your time and especially time with your family, would you do it? If this "something" had the potential for real...

I spoke to a friend today about a recent funeral he attended. He spoke about this young man, no older than 25, who, suffering some time from depression, suddenly passed away.

My friend overheard some of his friends talking amongst themselves. What he heard he found disturbing. The last...

Some time ago I wrote an article titled: Cyberbullying Hits Home. Following that article I was approached by some organizations who had so much more information to provide. Trend Micro's Lynette Owens, who runs the Internet Safety for Kids and Families program, provided some amazing insights as part of...

These days my life has gotten very busy. My weekends and weekdays have merged into a continuous stream of conversation via phone, text and email. Sleep is a luxury as I strain to get that last blog post up before the deadline. Many times my sleep is interrupted with an...

I had the privilege of speaking at Podcamp TO #PCTO2012 recently and chose to provide a perspective on the state of Canada and its lagging adoption of social media. Julie Tyios, a colleague of mine, collaborated with me on this important subject.

Here's the premise: Why...

2011 has seen some pretty significant technological innovations, which in turn has enabled consumer creation and curation abilities. This has further proliferated content creation en masse.

While 2010 saw businesses dip their toes in the social media pond, 2011 confirmed that social media is here to stay. Facebook reached...

A few months ago, I found out from my 10-year-old that a girl in her class has uploaded a video on YouTube about her. This girl was an on-and-off friend of my daughter, and I've questioned the friendship for some time. I could never have imagined that a small school...