Blogs

Sometimes the most obvious solution is staring you right in the face. Take businesses thinking about or already in the process of branding or re-branding themselves. They struggle with what to say, how to say it, and to whom to address it. But why? If they’ve been in business for a while, they have a…

Sometimes the most obvious solution is staring you right in the face. Take businesses thinking about or already in the process of branding or re-branding themselves. They struggle with what to say, how to say it, and to whom to address it. But why? If they’ve been in business for a while, they have a…

Communication, by its very nature, is a two way street. Someone speaks and someone listens—well, hopefully someone listens—and then someone speaks again; or someone writes and someone responds, and so on. People also communicate non-verbally. A gesture here and a wink there can have the same effect as words. People communicate in-person, face-to-face; by telephone;…

Marketing 101 teaches us to define our ideal client or customer (our “target audience”) and to gear our communications and marketing efforts toward that broad group. Not to the exclusion of others, of course, but the idea is that if we communicate what we need to the people we most want to be our customers/clients,…

Watching the ups and downs of Facebook stock over the last year, got me to thinking, “Maybe this social media thing’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” Add in Apple’s recent tumble from numero uno company in the land, and I really started to wonder if we’ve experienced some sort of social media/technology bubble and are…

The mid-winter blahs have no doubt hit our friends to the north, while we southern Californians bask in February sunshine that’s not too hot and not too cold. For me, this always seems like the perfect time of year to get sociable and share a slice of my “life in the sun” (at least virtually)…

With December passing by in its usual blur—what with Holiday parties, gift shopping, year-end celebrations, year-end jitters (hey, it happens!), and general merriment—I got to thinking about how “mobile” everything has gotten these days. So what if I leave home without checking an online price to comparison shop? It’s no problem. Out comes my trusty…

Seems every year about this time, either to catch the wave of back-to-schoolers or to whet the appetites of pre-holiday shoppers, Apple and other techno-giants unveil new products, upgrades, and/or plans for such. Rather than go in full blog mode on a subject near and dear—the seemingly nonstop churn of technology product life cycles—I thought…

In my end-all, be-all of monkey sales dreams, the ideal transaction would go something like this: I grow a great crop of bananas; I tell my fellow monkeys how awesome the bananas taste and how good they are for them; and then my monkey “prospects” literally fight over who gets to buy the bananas and…

Back in 1600, when Shakespeare penned Juliet’s now-famous line “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I doubt he ever imagined it would be used in a 2012 business blog about “branding.” But here it is. And with my sincere apologies to The Great…

WOW! 10,000 followers and counting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn . . . 50,000 likes! It’s fantastic, right? But what does it all mean? How can you leverage your followers/social media community effectively? How do you get action, results? I recently asked my social media community for help. It was interesting to see who viewed my…

Often when we hear the term “PR,” we mistakenly think about advertising or press releases, items that companies and individuals use to send information. And, certainly those things are important components of any good PR effort. But PR is so much more. PR is a company’s voice to the people. Just consider the term itself.…