I’ve been playing the heck out of Starcraft II recently, having finally gotten around to buying it. It’s tremendous fun and is a true real-time strategy game, like Warcraft was before World of Warcraft. Starcraft teaches you a heck of a lot about tactical strategy because it’s fairly unforgiving of bad strategy. You know whether…
When it comes to evaluating a new social network, such as the new Ello, one of the most important questions you can ask is how sustainable it is. The best perspective on the sustainability of any business is summarized by Jerry Maguire: How does this new social network – or any social network – plan…
Lots of different public speaking programs claim the ability to help you be a successful speaker, to be able to make people love you and adore you. With the exception of Oratium (which is more about presentation architecture than on-stage charisma), I’ve not found any that address the fundamental flaw in most speaking programs. The…
One of the constant career tips you’ll hear at every level of business and marketing is to go out and “network”. As a former IT guy, I once thought that networking with Ethernet cables and routers was significantly more fun and entertaining than business networking, where you force yourself to go out and talk to…
In marketing, we love to talk about optimization. Conversion rate optimization. Landing page optimization. Revenue optimization. Search engine optimization. Social marketing optimization. We dream of being able to squeeze every bit of performance out of our marketing machinery like a Formula 1 race car driver. In our endless quest for optimization, we forget one vitally…
Sara Jane Fair from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Social Media class asked if I had any personal branding tips for college students: @cspenn @AaronMPagan any advice on building our personal brands? #ritsm — sara jane fair (@sarajanefair) September 19, 2014 Let’s start with some Hippocrates: first, do no harm. While he was speaking of medicine,…
I was reading with interest a series of (print) articles recently in Fortune about people looking for their dream job. Much of the debate talked about perks, about job roles and responsibilities, and a lot of the side benefits of a job. What was glaringly missing from many of the discussions, however, is figuring out…
I’ve heard and read quite a bit lately about how data can fix everything in the enterprise. Big Data, small data, data lakes… data will make everything better. I read very recently how data replaces the “shoddiness of intuition”, how data can help to redefine your marketing to be science, rather than art. Except that…
Are you proud to be an American? Is America the kind of country that you think best represents you? Do you think other people in other parts of the world think, when confronted with a tough political, social, or economic problem, “What would the Americans do?” If there’s one commonality in today’s America that people…
