Blog

Community forum and message boards have been and in many cases are still the backbone of social media. In fact, when the Conversation Research Institute (my research company) dove into understanding online conversations about the senior living and senior care space in February, we discovered that 83 percent of those conversations took place on traditional […]

Image recognition is one of those social media analytics pieces that most social listening companies either can’t get right or charge so much for, no one can afford access. Brandwatch may have cracked the code. It’s new Image Insights feature provides the best image recognition and accompanying analysis I’ve seen in any social listening or […]

There are two critical components to a strong business recommendation. In fact, I’m convinced now more than ever that any recommendation — be it from an agency, a consultant or internal resources — must have these two components. The reason I’m sharing them with you today is a client for my consulting business called them […]

When software companies pitch me with some new feature, I normally discard the email. When Hootsuite added the opportunity to talk to social selling expert Koka Sexton to go along with its recent feature add-on called Amplify for Selling, I didn’t want to pass it up. Sexton has established himself as one of the leading […]

Managers are always looking for an edge or a hedge – an edge to get ahead or a hedge to hide behind. When your team has trouble collaborating, you have a tendency to inch closer to the hedge. It’s easy to forget with a few modest changes in approach, you can turn that direction around […]

I like Carlos Gill. A lot. He’s smart. He’s got a helpful spirit. He’s doing good work to energize people around digital and social media. He’s quite knowledgeable about Snapchat and other emerging platforms. He’s also bi-lingual which means he’s smarter than me in two different languages. But he posted something on Facebook last week that […]

I’m excited to tell you that we’ve officially scheduled another Small Business, Smart Marketing workshop! The next one will be Monday night, June 26 in Hazard, Ky., at the Kentucky Career Center Jobsite from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. I’ve partnered with the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program and BitSource to present the workshop, the […]

The easiest way to get your small business moving in the right direction with social media is to find and share good content relevant to your audience. Sharing links on your social channels is a method of easy content curation. But what if there was a way to do that, but also easily compile those links […]

On Wednesday, I have the honor of speaking to a group of salespeople from a large company. They’ve asked me to explain how to use social media for sales. While I will certainly touch on several sales techniques, the real approach to using social media for sales is to treat it as a networking event, […]

Social listening for small business is a popular soap box for me. It seems every time a good social listening tool comes along, they get funding and immediately drop reasonable pricing to target the enterprise, thus leaving the small business owner behind. Each time I find a new platform with pricing small businesses can digest, […]

I’ve been pondering the concept of agile marketing for a while now. Taylor Trusty, Leslie Radcliffe and I chatted about the topic on Blackstone Media’s podcast back in March. In fact, that podcast evolved into a Blackstone Media event where I’ll be giving a talk about agile marketing and what it means in today’s media environment […]

Imagine my surprise when the following subject line appeared in my inbox over the weekend: “The Real Reason Men Can’t Have Multiple Orgasms” No, it wasn’t an email from Cialis or Viagra that fought its way through the spam filters. (You don’t know how tempted I was to make that sentence far less bearable than […]