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One of the greatest challenges with using social media strategically is measuring its success. Boards need to understand how social media is helping meet their strategic objectives and need to set goals and define success early in the planning stage. Measurement is crucial to understanding whether these goals have been achieved.

How can charities hope to master and benefit from social media unless they understand its full potential and risks? Our new report, ‘Growing communities: How charity leaders govern social media globally to thrive online’ , reports on our interviews with charity CEOs from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US.

I spend a lot of time outside of work with friends and colleagues; going out, playing or watching sport, going to the cinema. But do I spend as much quality time as I should with my family? If you ask my Mum, she will say no.

As the global economy slowly recovers its verve, so business leaders in the hospitality and tourism sector are looking at new ways to grow their operations. So says our International Business Report (IBR), which interviews around 150 senior executives in the sector globally every quarter.

When it comes to charities and the not for profit sector, social media has often outpaced organisational change. Social media has huge potential to deliver services, foster internal values and sharing, and achieve strategic goals beyond communications.

I was interviewed last week on CNN to discuss the continued strength of global business optimism uncovered by our Q2 IBR economic update. The interviewer was particularly interested in the reasons behind business confidence around the world reaching a record high since we started asking this question in 2003. So let’s take a look at what the survey is telling us.

Do leadership styles differ around the world? This is one of the questions explored by our recent International Business Report. We asked 3,400 business leaders working in 45 economies to tell us how important they believe certain attributes are to good leadership.

It will not surprise an international audience that the build-up to the World Cup has been overwhelmingly negative in Brazil. Scenes of local protesting about the huge sums of money lavished on stadia in Manaus and Brasilia, which are likely to poorly used after the main event, have been broadcast around the world.

Outsourcing remains widely utilized by businesses across both sides of the Atlantic. The UK is seeing increasing utilization of outsourcing services across a number of industries, including the IT, HR, tax, and finance and accounting (F&A) functions within companies. And a recent survey shows that this continues to be attractive to companies within the USA, UK and EU.

Business growth indicators in the hospitality and tourism sector took a bit of a nosedive globally in Q1 according to our International Business Report (IBR). Expectations for increasing revenues, profits and investment all fell over the past three months.

The real estate and construction sector continues to make steady progress as it recovers from a financial crisis in which investors, developers and homeowners were disproportionately hit.

As the global economy slowly recovers its verve, so business leaders in the hospitality and tourism sector are looking at new ways to grow their operations. So says our International Business Report (IBR), which interviews around 150 senior executives in the sector globally every quarter.

I must admit that the optimism of business leaders around the world evident in our quarterly International Business Report (IBR) economic update was almost as surprising as it was pleasing.

Energy costs are a major concern for businesses in Italy: close to two in five business leaders expect rising energy costs to hinder growth over the next 12 months (38%) according to our Q1 International Business Report (IBR) results. This is above the global (35%) and EU (31%) averages and reflects the higher price of energy in Italy compared with the rest of Europe.

You may well have seen the news last week that the European Parliament approved a package of accounting reforms relating to the relationship between Public Interest Entities (PIE) and their auditors operating within the European Union.

We launched our annual M&A report – ‘Dynamic businesses at the forefront of M&A optimism’ – in Hong Kong last week. The report has provoked a good deal of debate and I just wanted to share two highlights from the data.