Blog
I launched my blog in 2009 when I was wrestling with a midlife crisis. Since then, the digital world has changed so much. I was new to both Facebook and Twitter when I started blogging, and I was still rocking the BlackBerry for email. Instagram hadn’t launched yet. Podcasting and short videos are what the cool kids do these days, blogging is considered old fashioned. But I still find it the best way to share my thoughts and to profile people who inspire me.
I hope you’ll find something here that inspires you, or at least sparks a conversation. Some of my favorite posts are pinned to the top, scroll down a bit more to find the most recent, or check out the categories in the sidebar.
Marketing means many things to many people, but the traditional definition generally includes what products you’re selling at what price, in what place and with what promotions. Depending on your business, you might translate that to anything from what your slogan and logo are to what kinds of brochure or website you use to communicate with customers and prospects. However…
Lately I’ve heard several variations on this question: I know I should use Facebook to promote myself, but I’m a private person. Should I just skip Facebook completely if I don’t want to share my personal life? The good news is that you control how much you share on Facebook. If you don’t want to tell the world every time…
With Memorial Day coming up, the summer vacation season is approaching. Why WHY do you bother with an autoresponder email that says something like, “I will be away April 12-19.” ? OK. That’s good to know. But what do I do now? Especially if I have an issue that can’t wait? Here are my thoughts on a good out-of-office message…
Last summer, I wrote a series of guest blog posts for Stirring Up Success, a B2B blog run by Dawn Foods, a manufacturer of bakery ingredients and products and distributor to the bakery industry. According to a case study by Crossroads, StirringUpSuccess.com has been featured in top industry trade publications as a unique and helpful tool for bakery owners. Here’s…
While thousands of music fans watched bands and ate good food in the rain at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, just a few blocks away, Launch Fest gathered a couple hundred entrepreneurs for talks about how to score investors and how NOLA can develop its tech-savvy talent pool. I got fired up by the enthusiasm and knowledge of the…
Last summer, I wrote a series of guest blog posts for Stirring Up Success, a B2B blog run by Dawn Foods, a manufacturer of bakery ingredients and products and distributor to the bakery industry. According to a case study by Crossroads, StirringUpSuccess.com has been featured in top industry trade publications as a unique and helpful tool for bakery owners. Here’s…
We met a woman this weekend who ran the Boston Marathon. It didn’t come up until we’d chatted for a while at a party. She didn’t even bring it up, but after she casually mentioned that she’s a marathoner, I asked if she knew anyone in Boston. I was there, she said, before adding she’d finished just 23 seconds before…
I held off on Marketing Monday last week — it just didn’t feel right to talk about increasing your business when we were still learning the extent of injuries in Boston. Deciding if, or how, your business should respond to current events can be tricky business. Maybe it seems straight forward to post an expression of grief about the Boston…
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. – Dalai Lama I had breakfast with a friend this week where among other things, we talked about a simplified view of human nature: are you a person who is irritated by life or a person who gets joy from life? Sure, I complain about things but overall,…
I have a fantasy about being a regular at the perfect bar. When I walk in, I’m greeted with a big smile by a server who knows what I like. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQpL5ZLQHyw] Problem is, I’m not the kind of person who can easily cultivate regular status. I’ve read articles that give pointers on becoming a regular, with suggestions like: Go to…
Most of us don’t choose our phone numbers, and unless you live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you probably picked your home first and the street number just came with it. However, you can choose your email address. As of last year, an Ipsos poll showed about 85 percent of people in the world use email. That might be even higher…
Earlier this year, New York magazine ran an article headlined “How to Read 31 Books in Four Minutes.” Far more abridged than even Cliff Notes, the article included just a handful of ideas from each self-help book. Maybe the universe will collapse in on itself if I further summarize an already very brief synopsis of some of the books they…
By this point, Facebook has become so culturally ubiquitous that probably even the remaining holdouts who don’t have an account have at least seen it and are aware of the concept of the interconnected social network. But even those who are active personally might not know how to use Facebook for marketing. Sadly, it’s getting harder, as Facebook’s algorithm for…
A few weeks back, I wrote about how to blog if you don’t like to write — take photos on Instagram or chat on camera using YouTube, for example. That post prompted several people to ask variations on the question perhaps best posed by Michael: How do I blog without looking like a douche who is bragging? There’s an oft-used…
Earlier this week I blogged about one theme I heard in digital marketing conversations at South by Southwest Interactive — authenticity — but the panel that really rocked me was about serendipity: Serendipity is a fuzzy concept that has a powerful effect on our lives. More than blind luck, it’s the product of lots of passion, insight, or proximity. As…
I recently returned from South by Southwest Interactive, a massive technology conference that takes over seemingly every square inch of Austin with growing numbers each year. While the marketing spending seems more pervasive — both Oreos and Game of Thrones sponsored pedicabs, as one small example — there’s still plenty of good content, ranging from 3D printing to the relationship…
I didn’t know much about David Foster Wallace when he died. I’d read a few of his essays and his widely circulated commencement address at Kenyon College, but that was the extent of it. The intensity of the reaction from well-read friends when Wallace committed suicide gave me a view into how admired he was. Flash forward a few years,…
When someone asks me how they get can more Twitter followers, it’s hard for me to give a straight answer. Not that I don’t know how to get more followers — there’s research showing, for example, that acting as a source of information instead of just talking about yourself will grow your audience. Hashtags help, as do including URLs and…
Frequently political candidates run on a campaign of running government more like a business. Presumably they mean things like more accountability and focus on results, as opposed to, say, accounting scandals or taking risks that put the country’s whole economy in peril. Lately as I follow news out of Washington, from the fiscal cliff to the massive budget cuts called sequestration,…