Tips for avoiding social media compulsion

Chris Brogan’s blog post, Your Blog is Not Your Job, contains some great tips on how keep blogging and social media from overtaking your primary work and focus. These include: Use an egg timer. If you’re going to venture out onto Twitter, time it. Keep a sticky...

The problem with social media “reputation management”

If you’ve been tracking the rise of social media services, you may have noticed how many are pitched as reputation management. “Reputation” is really just an efficient way of saying “what other people think about you”. And if you look at...

Confidential to Beer Guy

You know who you are. In the card-swapping frenzy that is SXSW, I’m not surprised to have a conversation interrupted so that somebody can give me his card, and ask for mine. It was only later that it seemed like a really, really bad idea for you to give me...

The beauty of baffling

It’s the nature of Twitter that you baffle half the people who follow you & are baffled by half the folks you follow. I wrote this tonight in response to an old friend who was teasing me about finding half my tweets baffling. It’s a comment I get a...

Need a woman for your all-male SXSW panel?

I’m looking forward to this year’s SXSW (including lots of panels featuring great women), but I’ve noticed that the all-male panel is alive and well. I’d like to offer up my XX chromosomes (among other qualities) to round out one of the...

17 tips for using Twitter to grow your business

Just like black-and-white photography can reveal depths you’ll never see in colour, the short length of a Twitter message encourages new levels of creativity and effectiveness in marketing. Don’t believe me?  Here are my top tips on getting started with Twitter…and each is 140 characters or less.