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Take a look at your marketing project list. It may be a traditional lined legal pad you carry around in a folio or color-coded Post-It notes surrounding your monitor like a dressed-up peacock. It makes little difference how you keep your list, because I bet we're all the same in how we tackle the things on them. We start with the easy stuff. And it will be our undoing.Whether you start each work week with a carefully plotted, organized list broken into "important" and "necessary" subsections...

Channel management (of the communication variety, not the sales/transaction sort) is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses. As consumers adopt new tools (and as tools mature and become more advanced), their expectations of brands grow. We want our MTV, and we want it via RSS, SMS, QR code, through Twitter, and, well, you get the picture. What needs to happen is a crossing of communication streams (a la Ghostbusters) to produce a more powerful solution, one that informs customer service...

Brand bibles, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides can provide general outlines of Do's and Don'ts, policies and common steps to issue resolution. As helpful as these resources may be to a social media specialist (or customer service rep), they can't replace personal experience and direct exposure to an assigned product or service.  A more dimensional and holistic training approach is critical to help front line staff make smart, informed, and controlled choices. Several high-profile brands gained...

Have you ever considered whether No should be the new Yes?  Constructive heresy. It's what's working for innovative businesses. How many times (as an employee) did you: go along when a difficult boss shut down your well-researched idea to drive new traffic to the company web site? bite your tongue when a coworker lobbied hard for "the blue version" of fluffy creative served up by your agency, when you really wanted to challenge them to re-examine the brief so they might actually get to the crux...

Becoming a social business isn't as easy as adopting a few tools and making a few status updates.  Designing an innovative company around disruptive technology means more than taking a shallow swipe at establishing a service line and chalkboarding a "sometime, down the road" SaaS. Work the room Last week I attended a networking event coordinated by the Technology Association of Iowa.  Dubbed Pitch and Grow and well attended by University of Iowa types, the event centered around entreprenurship...

You can send an email from a plane and cull the most meaningful links from your Twitter stream without any heavy lifting.  You may even check your RSS feed during the agonizingly long school choir concert (raises eyebrow).  Does what you read and experience in these micro-moments and other, less fractured, times/ways add up to anything meaningful? Asked another way, do those bytes count and help move your needle somewhere? I picked up on a tweet stream from Scott Abel around midday today...

Listen up.   Grab your AmEx and head on over to Amazon.  You’re about to buy a book. That is, unless you win a free book (and I have one to offer some lucky duck). But you’ll probably want multiple copies, so you still need that shiny green card. Share the knowledge wealth. Once you dive into Jay and Amber’s book, you’ll be flooded with warmth.  The clouds will part, and someone, somewhere will sing.  You may even be bathed in golden light if you’re sitting near a south-facing...

Customer satisfaction is a crucial element to building enduring customer relationships.  A brand image may be a composite of many things, but satisfaction is the glue that binds them all together. Over on the Social Media Explorer blog I recently wrote about the role of social media in achieving customer satisfaction.  Part technical tool review, part examination of socially-enabled communications, the post took a look at Groubal ( the "complaint as a petition" platform) but begged a deeper...

Recently Tamsen McMahon published a really great infographic on the Sametz Blackstone blog.  It's a decision tree that maps out paths for determining whether a tweet might get re-tweeted.  The graphic includes subjective filters ("Is it interesting?") and practical factors ("Am I busy?") to consider for those trying to spread the word about something on Twitter. We might add other subjective filters like "Will this be a 'me-too' RT?"  Sometimes you can really like something for its own merit...

Equal measures of confidence and self awareness can help those with drive achieve success.  The road isn't smooth; the map is even creased.  Knowing what you're capable of - willing to learn and work for - along with an honest grip on your strengths will help you resist those beguiling shortcuts.  People who take the easy route rarely get where they need to go, anyway. Mitch Joel wrote this line in a recent post on the Six Pixels of Separation blog: “You have to believe in yourself and what...