Over at Small Business Labs, Steve King set out his top 10 business trends for 2011. At number 9: "Freelancers Realize They're Small Business Owners." King identifies two categories of contingent workers: those embracing freelancing and those stuck with it because of...
Branding firm BBMG has released an interesting white paper on what it terms "co-creativity." The idea is for organizations to put their stakeholders at the center of a new, more participatory brand experience. BBMG writes: For all the hype about brands inviting...
Are you sabotaging your success? Sometimes the biggest barriers in business are the ones we create for ourselves. For example: It's just a business plan. It's just a blog post. It's just a speech. It's just a conference. It's just a tweet up. It's just a vendor....
Is your business structured the right way? There are legal, tax, and liability implications to how your business is structured. Not just the legal structure (e.g., LLC or corporation), but also whether you have an operating agreement and how it's written. And what...
Is your business sending out mixed messages? My condo building just completed a major redecorating project, in the process turning our lobby into a replica of a high-end, monochromatic coffee bar (sadly minus the barrista or the coffee). And that silly gas-powered...
So why are businesses using social media? According to the State of Social Media for Business, the top goals for companies are branding and community. Rounding out the top five are increasing Web site traffic (hmm, I hope that's not really an end in itself),...
I was just looking over a short report on business-to-business marketing put out by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research. According to What Works in B2B Marketing 2010, the top three challenges facing marketers are lead generation, increasing product/service...
I have a confession: I hated my "About Us" section for a long time. It was impersonal. Static. Written like it belonged in a so-last-century corporate brochure. Despite that, it took me two years to figure out how to rework the language to get the balance I wanted of...
I read this interesting post recently about the difference between building your name and branding your business. It looked at Chris Brogan (who's arguably more recognizable for his personal brand than for his company) and Jason Falls (who is perhaps better known via...
In keeping with the time constraints of busy, always on-the-go workers, MarketingProfs has created a new "Take 10" series: short, 10-minute presentations with actionable takeaways. I was smart enough to take 10 minutes out the other day to get a LinkedIn 101 refresher...