Why Blogs Make More Sense

As we begin 2010, I wish you real success, both online and off, in the year ahead. In a video I’ve already already shown you, marketing expert Darren Rouse, author of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, explains in detail his blog-centric approach to building a web presence, in which his blogs are his home [...]

Real Social Media Success in 2010

As the year and the decade draw to an end, success is a topic on most people’s minds. In 1,000 True Fans, Kevin Kelly develops a marketing paradigm for artists of all types, including musicians. A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see [...]

8 Social Media Basics for 2010

I’ve bookmarked and skimmed a dozen or more articles that project the path of social media in 2010. Collectively these articles represent many days of researching and writing. Search Social Media 2010 on Google, and you’ll be able to compile your own social media 2010 reading list. If the information in all the articles isn’t sufficiently [...]

10 Team Collaboration Strategies for 2010

Ivana Taylor, consultant and author of the marketing blog, Strategy Stew, presented 10 Must-Do Marketing Tips for 2010 in the OPEN Forum Idea Hub for Innovation. Reading through Ivana’s tips, I stopped at “Productize Your Services: It’s much easier to understand and purchase something that looks like a product.” This task has been on my [...]

12 Tips for Using Business Week’s Social Bookmarking Site

Looking over my traffic stats several weeks ago, I was very surprised to notice that a single visitor had been referred to my blog by Business Week. I traced the visit back to Business Exchange, Bloomberg Business Week’s social bookmarking site “that helps professionals discover and organize information from across the Web… a great way to [...]

10 Tips for Choosing a Social Media Consultant

I hesitate to write an article about choosing a social media consultant because of concerns about bias and my obvious conflict of interests. After writing Social Media Carpetbaggers and Snake Oil Salesmen, readers remarked that they had heard enough about the kinds of social media consultants to avoid and were ready to learn how to choose [...]

8 Simple Ways to Penetrate Social Media Clutter

The Global Map of the Social Web, newly published by Trendstream, illustrates country-by-country the already enormous Web 2.0 footprint. Not surprisingly, the rapid increase in social media usage has generated a corresponding increase in blogs, videos, photos and other social media content. For you and me as social media consumers, our choices seem endless. New content is [...]

Social Media Carpetbaggers and Snake Oil Salesmen

In the past week, social media hype and the competency of  social media consultants have been analyzed from different vantage points by prominent writers. ClickZ published an article, Here Come the Social Media Carpetbaggers by Rebecca Lieb. Social Media Carpetbaggers Rebecca pointed out that a combination of the recession, the decline of traditional media, and the nearly zero [...]

Social Network Privacy Hampers Marketers

A shorter article than the past one. Privacy and spam concerns continue to induce Facebook and Ning to make changes that hurt marketers. Facebook, for example, will end network affiliations, while Ning has already disabled the sharing of any content across participating sites. Good-Bye Facebook Networks Facebook members now use school, city of company network affiliations to control [...]

The Social Media ROI Obsession

As a business community, are we obsessed with return on investment? Is our preoccupation with measuring social media ROI counterproductive? In this article I look at social media from what might be a novel perspective. I hope to convince you that social media use need not impact the bottom line over the short term, and that [...]