If you aren’t one of the 4 million people who have already watched this video, take a quick look. Its a song about how Dave Carroll, a musician, had his guitar broken by my former employer, United Airlines. (The back-story is here http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/story/united-breaks-guitars if you’re interested.) Think about it, this video has been viewed on the Internet […]

I’ve been to Twitter Jail for the past few weeks and it wasn’t pretty. The effects are still being felt. (This hasn’t just happened to me, but a few of my Twitter-buds as well). In short, we used some tools online which, for some reason, flagged our accounts. My @desireescales account was (and still is) […]

This came across my desk last week. A small company in Blowing Rock, NC called Christopher’s Wine & Cheese is using social media to compete with large companies and their multi-million dollar marketing budgets. Banding together with three small Bed & Breakfasts, they are sponsoring a “B&B and Winery Dream Vacation” along the Blue Ridge […]

Back in the day when I was a flight attendant for a major airline, we were taught what I call the “Flight Attendant Effect.” It goes like this: If you pay special attention to just one customer on the plane, all the customers around him/her will feel special too and their impression of the airline […]

Last week we talked about how you can’t rush social media results. This week we’re going to talk about how to measure those very results. This is kind of a road map that let’s you know you’re on the right track. One of the first obvious things you want to look at is how many […]

Typical lifespan of a social media campaign: You get on Twitter. You put up a company Facebook page. You blog. You update your LinkedIn profile. You wait. A week goes by, nothing. A month, some activity, but no results. You quit. The problem is that you can’t quit. Heck, you can’t even slack off and […]

Funny thing about actively selling your product/service/brand through social media, it doesn’t work. Nope. Don’t even try. Get that idea out of your head right now. Think about this instead.  Imagine yourself at a party with hundreds of other people around. If you don’t like parties, imagine yourself in a pub at a table with […]

To continue the theme of social media bringing people together both in person and in online collaboration instead of driving them apart as some folks attest, I will present the following evidence to the former: This week, I hosted our first local Tweetup (noun, A real world meeting between two or more people who know each […]

Often, when I’m speaking about social media to a group of business-owners, some of them start to talk about how technology has basically shut people off from each other. They worry about how people have become utter zombies praying to the altar of technology and Tweeting or Facebooking 10 hours a day. They worry about […]

Social media gives people the ability to connect with other people and businesses throughout the world with technology that allows us to interact and share ideas. Social media’s operating word is the word “social.”  We live in a world where businesses are being forced to be more transparent and interact with their customers. This phenomenon […]