When I was speaking this week at T. Harv Eker’s marketing seminar, I took a straw poll on a simple question: “Who experiences digital overwhelm?” Most of the 600 attendees raised their hands. The poll needed little explanation, what with blogs to write, friend-requests to answer, social bookmarks to leave, tweets to twitter… and of course the bottomless morass of emails. Most of us who e...

Last Spring, I posted a video that explains how Twitter works. If you do it right, it can be a great way to communicate with your clients, prospects, co-workers, employees or friends. All across the Internet, applications are popping up around the Twitter application. I was exposed to TwitScoop a few weeks ago and I find it fascinating. You can literally watch trends grow on their homepage. What&#...

With the advent of Web 2.0 sites and tools, building your own small business marketing website has never been easier. In Brief 02, Andy demonstrates a WordPress plugin called SEO Friendly Images. Once installed, all the images on your blog are automatically optimized to be gulped up by search engines. Setting up your own WordPress blog is easier than you think and gives you nearly limitless functi...

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released a longitudinal study examining Inc. 500 social media usage. The key result is in early 2008 77% of the companies surveyed were using online social media. This is is up from 57% in 2007. The study was conducted by by Eric Mattson and Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., a Senior Fellow of the Society for New Communi...

Let’s start with an equation: Marketing = Relationships So long as you operate from that principle, you can’t go far wrong. The key to successful relationships, of course, is communication. And that’s true of ALL your business connections. Let’s just make a provisional list: Existing customers Past customers Prospective customers Allies and partners Social network connections Vendors an...

By Michael Arrington, TechCrunch.com Speculation about Twitter’s new round of financing is leading everyone to speculate on Twitter’s actual penetration into the “mainstream,” or lack thereof. Hitwise says web visits have increased 8x in the last year, albeit from a minuscule base. Compete shows about 900,000 U.S. monthly website visitors. Comscore puts the worldwide num...

As my good friend Jon Ward says, "The internet has become a conversation." Have you joined in yet? If not, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. This virtual conversation is global and it is as close as your computer screen. Take the social network, LinkedIn for example. With more than 15 million LinkedIn users worldwide, it’s amazing the old friends and classmates there are t...

I read management guru Tom Peters blog once in a while. Today I  ran across his post on the book by George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War. If you’ve read the book ,or seen the movie, you know that Wilson is the ultimate networker. Peters describes 33 lessons that business people can learn from Charlie Wilson.  The bottomline? Make friends! And then more friends! And then more f...

Today I had a third meeting with a local entrepreneur who is opening doors for me that I didn’t know existed. He has massive expertise in areas where my business could use help, and I have some know-how on branding that means the world to him. We’re swapping mentorship, and perhaps just as important, connections. Jeff is bringing me into contact with people who can multiply the reach o...