A client called and asked me about Twitter ads. He wanted to know if they were worth the investment.  I told him I hadn't looked into it yet and set out to find out what I could for my own benefit as well.  Along the way, I discovered something nifty and free.  But really really hidden from plain view.  Which is true of a lot of things.  What I found is the topic of this blog article - Twitter Analytics. Here's what you need to do to find these little gems.  Logon

This week I had an interesting conversation with a client. They know we, as a business, are active on social media and are seeing benefits.  My customer has been dabbling in the space for a while but is finding it too hard to keep up with the effort and is considering allowing their employees to also participate in helping with social media.  They asked me what is the right approach to take and after our discussion I realized it would make a good blog article. Social media and the

For the past two years I have been increasing my involvement in social business.  In the process I also kicked up the amount of blog articles I write.  When we switched our website to a Wordpress engine, it made sense to keep blogging current.  And it has worked in increasing the amount of traffic to our site and created additional business. That's all well and good but now comes the hard part.  In the beginning I had all kinds of information to write about.  News is

Google Drive is the new "Google Docs" where you can store and share spreadsheets, documents, PDFs, etc.  One of the options I bet you haven't tried or noticed is the ability to create forms.  These forms can be used to capture information that can be sent or stored on a spreadsheet.  Surveys are a good way to demonstrate this capability.  This blog article will get you started. Google Forms can be used to help plan events, send surveys, give students a quiz, or collect other

A few months ago I had a great lunch with a friend here in town who owns a marketing firm that has a particular emphasis on social media.  One of the things we discussed is the changing face of marketing.   What is also changing is the role of sales and salespeople. My company is really starting to focus on changing how we sell and market based on what I am seeing in the industry.  The whole topic gave me the idea for today's post. I’m going to start it off with

Back in 2009 I wrote a blog article about staying nimble in a bleak economy.  It is sad to note that we are still in that environment.  That made me think it was time to revisit this post and see what had changed.  Interestingly, not much.  I've added a few new items, but here is my take on what we are doing to stay ahead of the grim business reaper. Staying in business is important to my staff and I and we are celebrating our 15th year anniversary in 2013 and I want to make

Boy, times are tough.  Companies are hurting and I’ve been working with a lot of clients recently who are looking for creative ways to find new or keep existing clients.  These clients all have customer databases and are trying to figure out ways to mine the data and go after any low hanging fruit.  They tell me “the phones aren't ringing” and they need to find ways to make that happen.  In the process of helping people run reports and figure out who to

Several years ago I attending a marketing conference and the speaker talked about Lumpy mail.  Getting your message to clients is getting harder and harder so I am rethinking this idea for my own marketing tasks. Ever get an envelope that felt like it had something other than just paper inside?  What did you do?  You opened it, right? Of course you did.  We all love surprises and an envelope that is lumpy - meaning it holds something of interest inside - spurs us to find out