Month: June 2011

  • Video: Awaken Your Superhero from #140conf

    I had the pleasure and privilege of presenting at Jeff Pulver‘s 140 Character Conference in New York City about a favorite topic of mine, Awaken Your Superhero: One of the key points I hope you take away from this talk is that right now, you have superhero powers, you have opportunities to be a superhero,

    Continue reading →

  • How to make better interview videos with Levelator and iMovie

    At a variety of events I’ve been to recently, people have been shooting videos using handheld video cameras, usually inside their smartphones. These devices are wonderful – compact, good quality video recorders, even recording in 1080p. However, they all suffer from one major deficiency: The sound is usually terrible. Why? Most smartphones simply have small,

    Continue reading →

  • Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt

    Have you had people ask you how to get started in digital marketing? Are you working with social media practitioners who lack a firm grounding in the basics of marketing? I’m pleased to announce my first book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, is available right now in the Amazon store and at

    Continue reading →

  • Do Auto-DMs Work?

    Some people love them, some people hate them (rather like popups, right?). But the question isn’t whether or not you like them, the question is, do they work for generating any kind of traffic or attention? The answer is… let’s test! You see, as much as I may have an opinion on any given marketing

    Continue reading →

  • How to use rel=author tags for SEO

    Google’s created a concept called “AuthorRank” (coined by Matt Cutts here) in which savvy web writers can tag themselves in a variety of ways to let Google know that their stuff is legitimate. This is partly a reaction to the endless amount of scraping that goes on of content – by using rel=author and its

    Continue reading →

  • Little things with big impacts

    As I was prepping for a marathon of flights in the Austin airport, I took notice of a bottled water vendor (Thunder Cloud) that had a small bowl of neatly cut lemon wedges at the register. They were perfectly sized for the bottles they sell and probably cost the vendor a couple of dollars a

    Continue reading →

  • Dark economic times ahead?

    Are you good at putting together the pieces? There’s a lot going on in the world, and individual pieces may not seem like much, but put together they can create an attention-getting picture. Here are a few pieces you need to put together right now. 1. Europe’s financial system is crumbling. Specifically, the European Union’s

    Continue reading →

  • The nuances of strategy

    One of the topics discussed at the recent MARCOM forum which there was great confusion about was the entire concept of marketing strategy. Marketers are genuinely confused at this point about strategy from a company perspective vs. strategy for specific marketing objectives. Are they the same? Yes and no. The reason there’s so much confusion

    Continue reading →

  • Abdicating responsibility, losing power

    The old saying from Spiderman goes like this, from Uncle Ben to Peter Parker: “With great power comes great responsibility.” We know that power and responsibility go hand in hand. Irresponsible use of power eventually destroys both the power and the wielder – that’s just the natural order of things. Only with vision, care, responsible

    Continue reading →