February 18, 2014

I miss all the conversations I used to have on Twitter. So a few weeks ago I created a Twitter Chat called #DayChat as a virtual social media water cooler where my friends and I could hang out and chat about marketing vs just sharing links with each other. I also did it as a

Read More

January 8, 2014

Back in 2008, when I first made a serious foray into social media, I was just some a guy in New Orleans with a computer, a blog and a few ideas. I’m still just a guy with a computer, a blog, and a few ideas. But thanks to social media, I also picked up a

Read More

December 3, 2013

Inbound Marketing is overly focused on winning page one SERP (Search Engine Results Page) on Google and to a lesser extent Bing. Inbound Marketers preach that if your company can rank your website for your keywords, then leads, conversions and sales will follow. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t really want you to rank organically and that creates

Read More

August 6, 2013

How do you prove the ROI of your social media efforts? For most people, social ROI is proved by measuring likes, follows, tweets, retweets and clicks because they don’t think they can link social media activity to sales conversions. And truth be told, for most of the inexpensive social media management platform options available click/follow/tweet

Read More

May 29, 2013

Every day I talk to sales and marketing executives that lament their inability to convince their company to adopt social selling, inbound marketing and content marketing strategies and tactics. In fact I’ve gotten this question so many times that today I want to share with you the advice I give each of them. It’s a

Read More

May 21, 2013

Studies show that self-educating buyers regularly download white papers and eBooks as part of their pre-purchase research. They’ll gladly trade an email address for good information that helps them make a buying decision or just makes them smarter. But far too many companies today are making a huge mistake with their white papers and ebooks.

Read More

May 14, 2013

Edison Research just released another great study — Moms and Media 2013. There is a ton of good information in the report including key statistics showing that moms are increasingly digital, social and mobile. And as they adopt smartphones, all three of those variables increase in importance. The Social Mom According to Edison, 93% of

Read More

April 9, 2013

Lately I’ve been getting a lot more requests from to conduct LinkedIn Networking Workshops for B2B sales teams. It seems companies and organizations are finally waking up to the fact that LinkedIn is so much more than an online resume collection. At the same time I’m seeing an uptick in really bad LinkedIn networking attempts.

Read More

April 3, 2013

This post is a reprint of a post I wrote after returning from my first overseas trip in 2010 to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, where I conducted a series of social media workshops. If you want to read the entire series (this is the third and final post) I’ve included links to view the original

Read More

April 2, 2013

Ever have a salesperson claim they don’t have time to play on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+? If you answer no, then you’re either a liar or not listening closely because it’s the most common thing social media consultants have been hearing from sales organizations for as long as social media has been around. And

Read More

March 26, 2013

Hashtags were ‘invented’ as a way for a group of people to follow a single conversation on Twitter. If you’ve ever seen a tweet with # preceding a word, you’ve seen a Hashtag.  One of the greatest uses of Hashtags is to create real-time, ad hoc chat rooms called Tweet Chats or Twitter Chats. These

Read More

March 7, 2013

[fve]http://youtu.be/7tciDDwJICA[/fve] YouTube is the second most searched website in the world but one of the biggest challenges that most folks have is converting that viral video into website or blog traffic. It would be a lot easier if YouTube just let you embed links to your blog or website in the actual video. But alas,

Read More

February 5, 2013

Is your company using blogger outreach to help spread your marketing messages online? It seems many brands today are looking for a better way to build blogger relations campaigns but still struggle. So today I want to show you a short-cut to reaching even the biggest bloggers. The Biggest Blogger Outreach Challenges To be fair, some

Read More

January 10, 2013

Every year we see the same “Biggest Trends for XXXX Year” for marketing, technology, and especially social media. In 2011, I interviewed 52 social media thought leaders to see what they thought was “NEXT”. So, as 2012 has closed, let’s see how accurate they were. Social Media Predictions for 2012 I went back through all

Read More

January 8, 2013

I’ve been seeing a lot of folks asking for help, statistics, or strategies to help them convince their boss or their new boss or their company that social media marketing efforts have value and should be invested in going forward. Far too often those questions are met with a familiar people lamenting the need “in

Read More

December 11, 2012

Should we be on [insert name of new or hot social network here]? This is easily the most common question our digital strategy clients pose to us. Unfortunately, the answer is always the same — it depends. In the case of popular photo sites Instagram versus Pinterest, the data is pretty clear around which social

Read More

November 1, 2012

Have you ever wished someone would just give you directions for how to go from wanting to leverage social media for your business-to-consumer (B2C) brand to actually leveraging social media for your brand? Do you feel like you know what you hope to accomplish but just don’t know how to begin a social media strategy

Read More

October 31, 2012

Earlier this week I had a chance to talk with a bunch of Realtors about how they might consider using Social Media and digital tools to sell more houses by leveraging social selling techniques. During the course of the talk I mentioned how social media helps them to painlessly prospect. A few seemed to take

Read More

October 25, 2012

A few years ago I participated in a panel at BlogWorld Expo in Vegas. I had the pleasure of serving on a panel with a few outstanding travel marketers,  Doug Anweiler, Leanne Jakubowski and Mike Taylor where we tried to help travel bloggers understand how to better work with brands and the agencies that represent brands. As part of

Read More

October 22, 2012

Persuasion is an art and a science. Teaching the art is hard but the science is rather simple. Today I want to share with you five key characteristics of persuasive blog posts and a simple five paragraph template you can use to create your own persuasive blog posts. Real World Examples of Persuasive Blog Posts

Read More

October 4, 2012

I’m learning to love LinkedIn more and more as a B2B sales prospecting tool. But the more I use it, the more I wish someone at LinkedIn would get off their ass and make the platform what it could be versus what it is. Right now LinkedIn is a great tool for networking but leaves

Read More

October 3, 2012

Last week I received an @reply message on Twitter from a local Dairy Queen. It was pretty obvious they were just randomly reaching out in hopes of breaking through the social media noise and maybe get a follow back. Once I clicked through to see their account, my hunch was confirmed. As you can see

Read More

May 2, 2012

Digital continues to prove a disruptive force in marketing and continues to force marketers to look around the corner to stay ahead of their competition. Unfortunately, for many their looking glasses (as far as social media strategy is concerned) were a little foggy. Instead of finding digital strategy advisors with strong analytical and marketing (traditional)

Read More

January 25, 2012

Wanna know the biggest mistake companies make with their social media and content marketing efforts? Promise you won’t tell or think less of them for this obvious oversight? Ok… come closer…shhhhhh, don’t tell but here it is….. If no one finds your content, it doesn’t matter if it is interesting. Confused? Let me clarify. There

Read More

January 17, 2012

When companies first contact me about launching a social media campaign, they usually have three big questions. First, how much will it cost. Second, how long will it take. And third, how to approach the building of a blueprint for launching the effort. A few weeks ago my friend Mack Collier posted his second annual

Read More

November 16, 2011

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at the SoMeT — Tourism Symposium in Loudoun, VA. I’m really excited about this presentation because I’ll largely be addressing client side tourism marketers. I’m looking forward to hearing their thoughts on my hypothesis that their content calendars might actually be hampering the effectiveness of their social media and content marketing efforts. I’m

Read More

August 9, 2011

If there is one thing that binds all marketers together, it’s lack of enough marketing budget to properly fund all of your marketing efforts to create an optimum marketing mix. This is especially true for brands and destinations engaged in international marketing. Over the last few years I’ve experimented with combining brands and social media

Read More

May 10, 2011

So last week I asked you to look at a picture and then tell me What’s Missing From Your Blogger Outreach Strategy? So many of you responded, none correctly (at least as to what I thought was missing) so I wanted to share what I thought was missing from these two blogger outreach campaigns. But

Read More

April 27, 2011

We’re gearing up for our first New Orleans, workshop. For some time now friends and associates have been asking when we’ll create a special social media marketing workshop specifically for small business owners and marketers in small companies. A workshop that is designed to give them the necessary information and insight into exactly how to

Read More

March 30, 2011

This is a reprint of a post I originally wrote for Ad Age back in 2008. And while at the time I wrote it as the President of an ad agency, as I sit here now the owner of a Social Media Marketing agency, I realize, it’s just as valid now as it was then.

Read More