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Companies' escalating investment in social media--in particular, in Facebook--has become reality. However, most firms still do not see social networks as a vehicle for cultivating and winning customer loyalty, but rather as a resource for creating brand awareness. In this article, we offer a different view. By examining fans and non-fans of the Zara brand on Facebook, we discovered that Facebook enhances the relations that increase loyalty via trust, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and commitment. Our results revealed that these relations are stronger for fans of the brand than for non-fans, and suggest that customer satisfaction is the strongest determinant of loyalty. This indicates a new opportunity for marketing managers to achieve customer loyalty: Facebook.

The social media space has become a common place for communication, networking, and content sharing. Many companies seek marketing and business opportunities via these platforms. However, the link between resources generated from these sites and business performance remains largely unexploited. Both managers and financial advisors can profit from the lessons learned in this study. We conceptualize four channels by which social media impacts financial, operational, and corporate social performance: social capital, customers' revealed preferences, social marketing, and social corporate networking. An empirical test of our framework shows that 'followers' and 'likes' positively influence a firm's share value, but only after a critical mass of followers is attained. Our estimates suggest that Twitter is a more powerful tool to enhance business performance than Facebook.

Businesses have traditionally operated under a brick-and-mortar strategy, paying little attention to the electronic retail channel. Now, though, increasing competitive pressures and Web technologies as an information source necessitate that managers adopt an integrated click-and-mortar strategy. With differing levels of success, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have invested in their own websites to promote their online presence. However, the recent power of information intermediaries makes it difficult for companies to attract consumers solely through their own webpages. As a result, companies are being forced to adapt their online strategies to increase customer attraction; a proper use of backlinks and infomediaries can accomplish this at relatively low cost. This article traces the emergence of infomediaries and backlinks and the mechanics of their operation, offering managers and practitioners guidance regarding how best to improve the impact of their online visibility.

Although it is well accepted that corporate communication has a direct impact on corporate reputation, little is known about the link between firms' social media communication strategies and the formation of firms' reputations in an online environment. This article contributes to this body of knowledge by studying the impact of social media communication strategies on firms' reputations. The setting for our study is the hotel industry. The results offer insights regarding the challenges of developing online communication strategies that affect corporate reputation.

This empirical research explores how 16 global corporations from four different industry sectors--retail, technology equipment, food/beverage/tobacco, and consumer goods--use social media platforms and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to communicate about sustainability. Facebook, Twitter, CEO letters from annual reports and CSR/sustainability reports, and other company documentation are examined to compare the content and scope of these firms' corporate communication. The sample is divided into two subsamples (Green and Not Green firms) using Newsweek's Greenest Company 2012 rankings, and compared for differential use of social media and corporate reports. Results show that communication varies across firm and industry regarding types of sustainability initiatives reported, metrics employed, and communication media utilized, and that Green firms are more active than Not Green firms both in addressing sustainability and in general social media activity. Implications are discussed herein and recommendations are presented for companies seeking to better understand the effective use of social media and sustainability communication.

In this installment of Accounting Matters, we examine potential consequences of the Financial Accounting Standards Board's Proposed Accounting Standards Updates for Leases. In the context of a previous accounting change (FIN 48), we investigate how these changes will affect firms' accounting choices, investment decisions, debt covenant requirements, and analysis of other key financial data. Changes in accounting standards may have significant indirect economic effect on companies as they can trigger debt covenant violations, restrict access to capital, and distort key financial information used by investors and lenders. New accounting standards may also directly affect the calculation of employee bonuses and incentives that utilize EBITDA or operating income as benchmarks. We include recommendations for managers and identify specific debt covenant components that may limit the negative consequences of the proposed change to lease accounting.

Psychologist Carol Dweck's work on "mindset" has been hugely influential in fields such as education and sports training, and her 2006 book Mindset was a bestseller. Some people, Dweck has argued, view talent as a quality they either possess or lack, and thus have a "fixed mindset"; others, with a "growth mindset," consistently see potential to develop new skills. Now she is extending her work on mindset to organizations. This article describes her new research with Fortune 1000 companies and details several implications for managers. This reprint includes three additional Idea Watch articles: "Is Extra Legroom Worth Fighting For?" provides a visual analysis showing that on economy class flights, higher ticket prices don't necessarily mean greater comfort. "In China the Right Political Ties Count" describes a study of the TV manufacturing industry in China from 1993 to 2003 revealing that ties to local officials were associated with higher rates of company success, but ties to national officials had no such effects. "The Real Cost of 'Patent Trolls'" focuses on three new studies that show how damaging patent-troll lawsuits are to the economy. They suppress venture investing and R&D spending by substantial amounts.

The unexpected benefits of increasing transparency between employees and customers.

It was arguably the first financial scandal to play out in the public eye--and even Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe got behind it.

PwC's workforce is strikingly young: Two-thirds of its employees are in their twenties and early thirties. In the past, the assumption has been that most hires will eventually move on to other firms or other careers, while a few will be promoted all the way up to partner--rewarding and justifying years of long hours in service to clients. But a recent study done by the company revealed that the allure of someday becoming partner is no longer enough to generate high levels of engagement. Millennials are less willing than Boomers to make their work lives an exclusive priority, even when offered the prospect of substantial future compensation. They want job flexibility in the here and now, along with opportunities for training and mobility and more frequent feedback and rewards. PwC has instituted several initiatives in response to the results of the study: Employees are asked for their ideas on how to invest in human capital and given choices about what form their bonuses will take. Career paths have become far more flexible. Life skills and leadership training and sabbaticals demonstrate appreciation in nonmonetary ways. Participation in corporate responsibility programs has improved retention and engagement.

The knock on most CEOs is that their focus is too myopic--that they're fixated on achieving short-term goals to increase their pay. If you studied results produced over the long term, which leaders would truly show strong performance? HBR's ranking of the 100 best CEOs provides an answer. To compile our list, we examined how active CEOs of global public companies performed over their entire tenures. We took a scientific, objective approach, basing our evaluation on hard data, rather than on reputation or anecdote. For each executive, we looked at three metrics: the total industry-adjusted shareholder returns produced, the total country-adjusted shareholder returns, and the total increase in market capitalization. The CEOs who made the 2014 list have undeniably been effective. On average, the top 50 have delivered total shareholder returns of 1,350% during their time on the job. That translates into an annual return of 26.2%. Adjusting for industry effects, average total shareholder returns for the top 50 are 1,161%, and for country effects, 1,087%. But the results turned in by the #1 CEO on our list, Jeff Bezos, were especially impressive. Under his leadership, Amazon produced country-adjusted returns of 15,189% and industry-adjusted returns of 14,917% and grew its market capitalization by $140 billion. We also collected biographical and compensation data on the CEOs to see if we could identify what they had in common and whether there was any correlation between performance and pay. While the top 100 have each had unique journeys to success, there do seem to be two preferred pathways: Over a quarter of the CEOs have MBAs, and nearly as many studied engineering. But in some ways, Bezos's place at the top says it all: The best CEO in the long haul turned out to be one who frequently underperformed in the short term--while continuing to make big bets on the future.

Information technology is revolutionizing products, from appliances to cars to mining equipment. Products once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts have become complex systems combining hardware, sensors, electronics, and software that connect through the internet in myriad ways. These "smart, connected products" offer exponentially expanding opportunities for new functionality, far greater reliability, and capabilities that cut across and transcend traditional product boundaries. The changing nature of products is disrupting value chains, argue Michael Porter and PTC CEO James Heppelmann, and forcing companies to rethink nearly everything they do, from how they conceive, design, and source their products; to how they manufacture, operate, and service them; to how they build and secure the necessary IT infrastructure. Smart, connected products raise a broad set of new strategic choices for companies about how value is created and captured, how to work with traditional partners and what new partnerships will be required, and how to secure competitive advantage as the new capabilities reshape industry boundaries. For many firms, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question: "What business am I in?" This article provides a framework for developing strategy and achieving competitive advantage in a smart, connected world.

When Google bought Nest, a digital thermostat and smoke detector company, for $3.2 billion just a few months ago, it was a clear indication that digital transformation and connection are reaching critical mass, spreading across even the most traditional industrial segments and creating a staggering array of business opportunities and threats. The digitization of tasks and processes has become essential to competition. General Electric, for example, was at risk of losing many of its top customers to nontraditional competitors--IBM and SAP on one hand, big data start-ups on the other--offering data-intensive, analytics-based services that could connect to any industrial device. So GE launched a multibillion dollar initiative focused on what it calls the industrial internet: Adding digital sensors to its machines, connecting them to a common, cloud-based software platform, investing in software development capabilities, building advanced analytics capabilities, and embracing crowd-based product development. With all this, GE is evolving its business model. Now, for example, revenue from its jet engines is tied to reduced downtime and miles flown over the course of a year. After just three years, GE is generating more than $1.5 billion in incremental income with digitally enabled, outcomes-based business models. The company expects that number to double in 2014 and again in 2015.

Big data and the "internet of things" promise revolutionary change to management and society. But their success rests on the assumption that all the data being generated by internet companies and devices scattered across the planet belongs to the organizations collecting it. Pentland suggests that companies don't own the data, and that without rules defining who does, consumers will revolt, regulators will swoop down, and the internet of things will fail to reach its potential. To avoid this, he has proposed a set of principles and practices to define the ownership of data and control its flow. He calls it the New Deal on Data. The New Deal is "rebalancing the ownership of data in favor of the individual whose data was collected," Pentland says. "People would have the same rights they now have over their physical bodies and their money." They could see what was being collected and then opt out or opt in. Many companies are afraid that the regulation of data collection will kill their business models, he says. But he believes that it will make for a healthier economy--and that it will prevent disasters such as the criminal use of data in a way that affects critical systems and causes deaths. "If that kind of disaster happened," Pentland says, "there would be an overreaction: Shut it down. You'd see very strong regulation passed overnight, and a lot of companies would be in deep trouble."

Commercial success with a new technology usually depends on the exclusive ownership of a critical asset or capability. But to create the technology, an innovator draws on knowledge from many different sources. Inventors who mismanage that tension often fail to successfully commercialize their innovations. To understand how to manage the tension, the authors carried out a comprehensive analysis of more than 1,000 inventions from the University of Wisconsin's Technology Transfer Office. They interviewed the TTO's senior leadership, IP managers, licensing and contract managers, legal counsel, and other staff to get firsthand knowledge of how inventions were evaluated for commercial potential. From this research they identified seven IP traps that unwary inventors (individuals and companies alike) fall into when developing scientific discoveries and inventions for the commercial market. The traps include publicly disclosing information prematurely, neglecting to enforce patent infringements, failing to demonstrate sufficient originality, overrelying on known science, failing to stake out the best territory for applications of the technology, mismanaging attribution of contributors, and ceding too much control over IP to funders. Drawing on examples encountered in their research, the authors describe these traps and offer advice on how to avoid them.

Health care providers in much of the world are trying to respond to the tremendous pressure to reduce costs--but evidence suggests that many of their attempts are counterproductive, raising costs and sometimes decreasing the quality of care. Kaplan and Haas reached this conclusion after conducting field research with more than 50 health care provider organizations. Administrators looking for cuts typically work from the line-item expense categories on their P&Ls, they found. This may appear to generate immediate results, but it usually does not reflect the optimal mix of resources needed to efficiently deliver excellent care. The authors describe five common mistakes: (1) Reducing support staff. This often lowers the productivity of clinicians, whose time is far more expensive. (2) Underinvesting in space and equipment. The costs of these are consistently an order of magnitude smaller than personnel costs, so cuts here are short-sighted if they lower people's productivity. (3) Focusing narrowly on procurement prices and neglecting to examine how individual clinicians actually consume supplies. (4) Maximizing patient throughput. Physicians achieve greater overall productivity by spending more time with fewer patients. (5) Failing to benchmark and standardize. Administrators, in collaboration with clinicians, should examine all the costs of treating patients' conditions. This will uncover multiple opportunities to improve processes in ways that lower total costs and deliver better care.

In today's organizations, innovators are in demand everywhere--from the factory floor to the salesroom, the IT help desk to the HR department, the employee cafeteria to the C-suite. Innovation isn't a department, the authors say; it's a mindset that should permeate your entire enterprise. And what fuels it is insight--an imaginative understanding of an internal or external opportunity that can be tapped to improve efficiency, generate revenue, or boost engagement. Sawhney and Khosla outline seven "insight channels" that would-be innovators in any function or role can use: (1) Anomalies, or data that deviates from business as usual; (2) Confluence, when economic, demographic, and technological trends come together; (3) Frustrations, which lead to innovative workarounds; (4) Orthodoxies, which can spark a search for alternatives; (5) Extremities, such as fringe members of stakeholder groups who push for solutions; (6) Voyages, whereby innovators leave their offices to visit colleagues or customers; and (7) Analogies, useful ideas or systems in other teams, business units, companies, or industries.

Norman Lear, perhaps most famous for the creation of "All in the Family," has spent his entire career behind the scenes. He talks about negotiating with network bosses, bringing out the best in writers and actors, and more.

The author has worked in advertising for four and a half decades, and during those years he has spent a lot of time persuading clients to run ads that feel risky--maybe even dangerous--when they're first pitched. A client's risk appetite depends on the emotional makeup of the decision makers, the state of the company, the industry it's in, and many other variables. Strategy is the rigorous, behind-the-scenes part of Fallon's process: Driven by research and consumer insights, it helps to precisely define what the company is trying to accomplish with a campaign. Realizing that the agency has thought it through, the client becomes more comfortable taking the leap. The author describes three highly successful campaigns: "Live Richly" saturated New York City and other big markets with provocative signs that proved much more powerful than TV ads and created meaningful differentiation for Citibank in a category that had defied differentiation. "Just the Right Amount of Wrong" developed a niche market for the Cosmopolitan hotel of Las Vegas--people who like the spirit of the Strip but want something more refined. "Never Settle for Less" helped H&R Block expand its customer base by offering a free second look at tax returns in various locations. The company's professionals discovered thousands of dollars in additional refunds, and ads created from film footage of the event raised consumer awareness of a key selling point.