Quotes from Simon Mainwaring

Brands are facing a new competitive landscape in which self-definition, core values and purpose will increasingly define their ability to reach customers that only allow what is meaningful in their lives to pass through their filter.

Social technology gives leaders a vital new platform with which to connect their companies to the myriad stakeholders who have an interest in their well being.

Define what your brand stands for, its core values and tone of voice, and then communicate consistently in those terms.

Brands must become architects of community.

It is a truly powerful phenomenon when a brand makes a stand for what it believes in.

Greed has increasingly become a virtue among Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world do CEOs insist on receiving compensation as high compared to what their employees earn.

Done correctly, everyone from individual speakers to large organizations can inspire citizens and customers to spread a message using their own social channels, and in so doing, inspire countless supporters to build their reputation, profits and social impact.

Your computer needn't be the first thing your see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.

A world in which government is burdened by historic debt, philanthropy has limited resources, and the private sector is only interested in its own personal gain is simply unsustainable.

What today's business reality makes clear is that brands cannot survive in a society that is failing economically, socially, ethically, and morally.

More and more companies are reaching out to their suppliers and contractors to work jointly on issues of sustainability, environmental responsibility, ethics, and compliance.

More than ever before, consumers have the ability to unify their voices and coalesce their buying power to influence corporate behaviors.

For decades, media companies have largely controlled the tools through which consumers were told what to buy, wear or think. Now consumers possess the same ability to produce, distribute and curate content and distribute it to their peers in real time across social media platforms.

The advent of Google+ and the emergence of the personalized web means this is more true than ever. Brands, and their advertising partners, must wake up to this challenge and define themselves with clarity, consistency and authenticity. Otherwise they just might find themselves shouting in a ghost town.

The launch of Google+ apps sends a powerful signal - the personalized web has begun. What this means is that the way information is structured and accessed will turn on the individual, or rather their personal profile which is a composite of all the data collected on the basis of what they have searched for and shared.

Radical transparency has an enormous impact on our personal lives. We can no longer share thoughts, quips, photos or personal opinions anywhere on the web without being mindful that they may turn up where we least expect it (notably job interviews, divorce proceedings or public media).

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

No one doubts the enormity of the social challenges we face around the world but one critical element of our response must be the generation of new thinking and ideas. Yet creating the conditions that make this possible is not simple.

CEOs must embrace the role of serving as the public face of the company to their customer community and the marketplace at large.

Non-profits must become deeply engaged in the ways that their donor communities are using social technology.

The false separation between living and giving must end.

As a speaker, business leader or marketer of any type, the onus is now on each of us to become equally capable of communicating very personally with a seemingly endless number of people connected by social technologies.

With the never-ending stream of new social technologies, apps and platforms rolling out every day, its easy to get lost in the minutiae of social media. Yet for there to be effective change, especially within large, top-down, hierarchical institutions, a company must have an over-arching understanding of the new role it has to play.

Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.