In Tom Miner's book, “Social First Brands: How Modern Brands Create Community, Loyalty, and Growth”, published through Kogan Page he talks about how brands today need to be social first and place the consumer at the centre of what they do.

Many of you will read that and say, we already do this, Tom argues you are brand centric, placing your brand front and centre in what you do.

Check out my article, “Social-first thinking: Why your brand shouldn’t be the star of the show”

In Tom's book he explains that in the first era of social media, the social graph reigned, we connected with work colleagues, ex-work colleagues, family and friends and the content we consumed was oriented around them.

Today, things have matured to what he calls “the interest graph”, which means we now follow people, we know, like and trust, based on the insight that share.

I was on a call with Linkedin, somebody claimed that Linkedin was full of people pitching, sharing brochures and case studies; all stuff we know what that means “but my product because we are great”.  Totally predictable and zero value.

LinkedIn actually recommend that you unfollow these people, something we've been saying for years

Come on we all want a fresh feed of insight, educational content and content that will inspire us, let's get rid of the brochure and brochureware slop brands keep handing out and getting their employees to share.