The big push for Black Friday is over, as is the Thanksgiving holiday (if you’re in the States…). Your business is now poised for the long haul to Christmas and whatever kinds of hours and effort that means for your business and you personally. However, the Internet never stops and, like any good business or professional, you’re thinking past the hats and champagne of the New Year towards 2016 business planning. My monthly 5 best of the best for November will help you. Read them all and then do what you learn.

Paying real attention to your customers’ experience all along their journey will pay off. Customer experience (often abbreviated as CX) is quickly overtaking price and even product as the key competitive differentiator among brands.  This post by Larisa Bedgood of DataMentors touches on three key points you must attend to when moving with this trend.

Any good business knows the importance of strategy, hence the bedrock need for things like a business plan. However, my experience is that very, very few professionals and Small-to-Medium sized businesses (SMBs) have a social media strategy. If you want to be successful in social, you need a strategy. This post by Andy Nathan of Smart at the Start gives you some items to consider. Once you get a feel for the real value of a social media strategy, you will likely want some expert help in getting it right and making it effective for your business. That’s what my company, Social Sapiens, does. Don’t wait. Get started now.

Mark Schaefer of BusinessesGrow.com is one of the folks spearheading both wisdom and practicality in the worlds of social media and content marketing. I subscribe to his newsletter and regularly refer to his work and insights, particularly as I feel they support and lead SMBs . This article is really helpful, since in it he enumerates through the advice he gives out frequently to other professionals and companies….so you get to take it in and leverage what makes sense for you! Me? I’ve got this one hanging on my wall…..

Remember what I just said about Mark Schaefer? Well, Brian Solis is another one of “those guys”…aside from a number of books like What’s the Future of Business (WTF), Engage!  and The End of Business as Usual, his work with the Altimeter Group as digital analyst, anthropologist and futurist continues to put him at the forefront of the humanizing of technology and figuring out what to do about it. In this article, he gets past the usual frustration and confusion about what hashtags are for, getting to not only how they must be relevant and “more human” but to how to leverage some emerging analytics tools and platforms to get there.

I always tell my clients that part of my job is to try to keep track of the dynamism (one word for it…) of the changing social channels. Facebook, because of its pervasiveness across the world and deep user base, gets even more attention when things change. Most every change impacts both users and businesses, but can have a more fretful effect on businesses since so many are relying on the platform more and more to drive their social media strategy (or at least part of it…). This excellent post by Martin Beck of Third Door Media covers many of the major changes in Facebook’s Algorithm with some cursory explanations of what that actually means to you.

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