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If you have no precise marketing strategy, or even a simple set of marketing goals, social media participation will only serve as a glorious way to highlight that your business is precisely like every other business that says they do what you do. (That's a nice way of saying you are doomed to compete on price.) Read More

Is Social Media Changing Selling? Marketing podcast with Mike McLaughlin (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download — subscribe now via iTunes [ Professional Services Sale ... ] Social media has certainly changed marketing, but few people are addressing just how dramatically it's changed sales. In this interview we hit that subj Read More

I'm a big fan of the newish Twitter List function. I wrote about it last week — 5 Reasons to Use the New Twitter Lists Feature Now that I've you pumped up about using lists, I want to talk about a few tools that I think can make the feature even more useful. Read More

In a fit of collaboration goodness I would like to gift one set of seven awesome books to the person that most creatively answers the following: I get the biggest return for my business using social media when I [fill in the blank] I'm the only judge and I'm going to pick the answer I like the best. But, here's what you'll get if you win. Read More

LinkedIn and Twitter announced an integration today that should be interesting. Starting sometime today, LinkedIn users can automatically feed their Twitter status updates to their LinkedIn status updates. While LinkedIn's status update feature is right there for all to use, my experience is that people don't use it nearly as much as they shoul Read More

Twitter added a new feature recently called Lists. I have to admit, at first I thought this was no big deal. I use desktop twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop to create groups and lists already, so what's the big deal. Once I started playing around with Twitter's List feature I quickly became hooked and think there are some grea Read More

Fortunately, it's starting to feel like the wave of social media hype has crested and small businesses can turn their attention to understanding social media “best practices” rather than obsessing over next week's new tool. Today's greatest small business opportunity awaits those who learn to skillfully blend the awareness creating, automating, Read More

Many times business owners and marketers look for ways to create innovations and points of differentiation through elaborate technical add-ons or by attempting to create entirely new product or service categories. From my experience, one of the best way to create an innovation or differentiation for your business is to take something people alr Read More

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast I had the pleasure of chatting with Chris Brogan. Chris is the President of New Marketing Labs and co-author of Trust Agents — Using the web to build, influence, improve reputation, and earn trust. Chris really is one of the super stars of the online social media world and while he would never Read More

One of the delights for many who dine at Chinese restaurants is the fortune contained inside the little cookie desert. Finding little hidden gems inside a surprise package takes us back to the fun we had at birthday parties and opening presents during a holiday. I think businesses can tap the fortune cookie tactic in their own little way to Read More