Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day, at SocStardom. He hosted a wide-ranging discussion on the social Web, networking and product feedback cycles, social capital, transparency--and, yes, how to get...
What can big companies learn from entrepreneurs? And what can entrepreneurs learn from big business? "Small businesses have important, competitive advantages. When founders are leading the company, they do so with an authentic passion to deliver on a vision. They know...
My latest business column is out. And it's all about where entrepreneurs go for business advice. My approach is to have an informal advisory board of smart people. Mine have great business instincts, good marketing ideas, and business development savvy. And they're...
I'm a business owner, so I get the idea of upselling products and services. But you have to know when to do it, and when doing so will drive business away. Case in point: the Exxon station down the street from me. I swiped my credit card as usual, filled up the tank,...
What would you do to reinvent business? It didn't take $18 billion in Wall Street rewards to corporate failure to realize that the way we do business has to change. The debris from our old models is littered across the U.S. and global economies. But what should 21st...
Sometimes an ad is just an ad, and sometimes you screw up in ways that will resonate for a long time. My mother still talks about one particularly awful promotion: a local department store which, at the height of the 1968 riots, ran ads to alert customers that while...
What do a feminist author and a soap opera star have in common? You can do a lot of free association when you're on cold meds. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about something related to advertising. That got me thinking about a book I once read for a...
I once gave a talk to a group of independent consultants about how losing a big client can be a good thing. I've been thinking about the topic a lot lately as I see more and more people lose jobs or clients, or feel the pinch of shrinking marcomm budgets. As many of...
When I wrote my post about the value of LinkedIn, I called it a "must have" element of every professional's online presence. I still believe that. So why are so many people devaluing their profiles with endless drivel? I belong to several LinkedIn Groups, and they are...
Is health care reform on the horizon? I posed this question last month to Business Week Editor-in-Chief Stephen Adler in the context of business cost pressures and growing unemployment. Here's how I live tweeted his answer at the time: On health care, Adler wonders...