Simon Mainwaring

We First provides consulting and training to help companies tell the story of their good work in ways that build their business

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If you’re a speaker, author, trainer or consultant (as I am) you’re constantly thinking of ways to grow your customers and business with a limited budget and resources. Yet the social business marketplace and technology are changing so quickly it’s easy to feel anxious, stuck or overwhelmed. On top of that you have little time […]

If you’re a speaker, author, trainer or consultant (as I am) you’re constantly thinking of ways to grow your customers and business with a limited budget and resources. Yet the social business marketplace and technology are changing so quickly it’s easy to feel anxious, stuck or overwhelmed. On top of that you have little time …

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There’s no doubt social media opens up a lot of opportunity for small businesses, but it also creates a lot of questions. Where do you start? What should you do? The answer might surprise you. The smartest brands like Nike, Coca-Cola and Starbucks, don’t start with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. They start with what story they …

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Social Media around the World 2012 (by InSites Consulting) from InSites Consulting Part 2 of a guest post by Steven Van Belleghem, author of The Conversation Company & The Conversation Manager. Part 1 is here. How to exploit all the possibilities of social media Here are the conclusions of our study of social media around the world. Our first conclusion …

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With so much understandable anxiety over budget allocation and concrete ROI, especially is you’re a small company, it’s valuable to study the best practices of those brands that have earned their way into the likability Hall of Fame. So here’s ten brands that are each among the most liked and a unique strategy they employ …

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There are certain mainstays of social media community-building – creating content that commands or arrests the viewer’s attention, engaging them around some action or contribution motivated by shared values, and finally, rewarding them in some way that earns the participant social capital or recognition. Yet, in most cases, that’s where it ends and where the …

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The recent Facebook/GM arm wrestle just prior to the Facebook IPO raised an important issue as to whether Facebook should reformat its advertising to suit marketers or continue to let users drive its advertising. I believe Facebook has it right as power continues to shift towards consumers as a function of our business and personal …

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