Wait, a Words With Friends Board Game?

I rarely pay attention to commercials. They're my least favorite thing about watching TV. (I don't think I'm alone in this either.) Last night, though, I happened to catch one that boggled my mind.

It started out with a claim something along the lines of "Now, you can turn your favorite digital game into real life!" When I looked up, expecting some crazy visual of people throwing birds at stacks of pigs, I actually saw something that made me laugh out loud. This magically tangible digital game was.....Words with Friends.

I'm sorry, what?

The popular mobile game comes to life!

Is making Words with Friends "come to life" actually a revolutionary thing? I'm pretty sure this existed way before smartphones were even a thought. Although I can see that this is an opportunity for Hasbro to rebrand a really old product and make a new wave of money off of it, I feel like this claim isn't the way to approach it. Have we really already gone so far into the future that we can just pretend that Words With Friends came first and now it's a real life game? Probably not. There are so many other things that game companies like Hasbro could be profiting off of; this one is just silly.

Get Your Head out of the Sand: Advice from Sir Richard Branson

Originally on the Scoop.it Blog.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of listening to a fireside chat with Marc Benioff and Sir Richard Branson at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce X.

Richard Branson hardly needs an introduction, but just in case, he is the founder of Virgin Group, who runs businesses in almost every industry imaginable, including a record label, banks, airlines, hotels, and even space travel. Branson has been an entrepreneur since he was 16 years old. At that time, he had a friend who was a singer who couldn’t get signed by a record label. Branson decided that if no one was going to sign his talented friend, he would create his own record label and do it himself. The rest is history.

Since Sir Richard Branson is one of the most admirable, successful, socially responsible, and positive-thinking entrepreneurs of our time, it’s hard to not listen to every word that comes out of his mouth. In the talk with Salesforce.com CEO Benioff, Sir Richard talked about a plethora of topics ranging from his entrepreneurial beginnings to his sense of adventure to his future plans to make the world a better place.

While each and every topic proved to be equally if not more interesting than the last, Branson said one thing that really hit home for me:

“For a business to not embrace social media…you’ve clearly got your head in the sand.”

It might seem like a pretty cliché thing to say these days, but when I really think about it, it’s one of the truest clichés I’ve heard. Hearing this made me think of Marc Benioff’s keynote speech from earlier yesterday morning, where he shared the statistic that 70% of businesses today have gone social. I remember thinking to myself that the other 30% must be living under a rock. It sure feels good to be on the same page as Sir Richard Branson!

That said, it’s time to get your head out of the sand. One of the best ways to build a presence for your brand on social media is through content marketing. Sharing information not only gets your name out there, but helps build authority and form relationships within your community by providing your readers with quality content related to your brand.

It goes without saying that this all takes a lot of time; time that most of us don’t have.The answer? Curation. Turning your business social doesn’t have to take up 10 hours of your day. You can easily feed your social media accounts with great content and promote engagement among your audience by spending a few minutes each day on Scoop.it. Now that we’ve partnered with BufferApp, you can take a short chunk of your morning, find a few pieces of relevant content to share, add your point of view, and fill up your Buffer for the day. Then, get back to work and let us do the rest! All of your social media streams will now be constantly flowing with content and your readers will have that many more reasons to interact with you and your brand.

Don’t bury your head in the sand; your business needs to embrace social media. Scoop.it is a one-stop-shop for finding great content, providing context, and sharing it to all of your social networks in one click. It’s time to change that statistic from 70% to 100%, and that begins on Scoop.it.