
One Small Change I Made That Improved My Daily Mental State
We all have a pretty good idea about things that drag down our productivity or suck up time that would be better spent on more fulfilling activities. Two years ago I made a commitment to stop bringing my mobile phone into my bedroom and with like a 95% compliance rate this made a big improvement. […]

Some Thoughts on Twitter as a Micro-Blogging Tool
1/ Twitter started off positioned as a micro-blogging platform but in the end became more of an RSS reader — Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015 2/ @pmarca popularized the “Tweetstorm” which ironically brought the real concept of microblogging to Twitter many years after its inception — Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015 3/ What […]

Social media ROI smackdown: What your business can’t afford to ignore
Billions of people experience social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as an integral part of their daily life. Social media is where we socialize with friends and cultivate professional relationships. For brands and corporations, social media is a core part of efforts to engage customers, whether through digital marketing, service and support […]

Is social media really a waste of time? Harvard professor gets it wrong
A prominent author tells brands that social media will not help their bottom line. Marketing leaders think differently.
CMO strategy session: The new discipline of ‘social lead management’
The relationship between IT and marketing is symbolic of larger changes taking place in enterprise technology. The proliferation of sophisticated end-user software, often based in the cloud, has created deep technology expertise in functional areas such as marketing. I asked the Chief Marketing Officer of LexisNexis, Steve Mann, for a snapshot of marketing innovation that intersects […]

DataSift Announces Mega-Round. Apple Buys Topsy for $200 Million. Here’s What You Need to Know
I’m super proud to announce that DataSift has just completed a $42 million financing round coming at the end of a year where its revenue grew several hundred percent year-over-year. Considering our revenue is SaaS revenue this achievement is even more remarkable. The timing of the announcement of this investment couldn’t have been timed more […]

Influence tools: the devil is in the details
For those of you who haven’t heard of Klout, let me give you a brief history: they started back in 2009 with a lot of marketing, a so-so product and non-existent service. They had two ways of handling criticism: either shower the critic in increased Klout score, or ignore him (or her). With criticism multiplying […]

Why Titles Matter a Lot if You’re a Blogger
Gabe Rivera wrote a post on why TechMeme is now using its editors to curate titles that appear on its site. Gabe’s post appears first on TechMeme’s website, which must mean Gabe has paid off some TechMeme editors to get his story to rise to the top. I never saw it go out with a […]
Fake Testimonial Tweets Teach an Enterprise Lesson
In an effort to boost its ad marketing platform aimed at television advertisers, Twitter fabricated positive comments from several users. The company apologized, but only after the SF Gate newspaper outed these fake testimonials. As Twitter well knows, user testimonials occupy a significant role in the worlds of both enterprise and business-to-business marketing. For technology vendors, […]

CxO Talk episode 1: Guy Kawasaki on influence for APEs
CxO Talk, my new talk show with co-host Vala Afshar, debuted with a conversation on marketing and influence with author and investor Guy Kawasaki. Guy’s most recent book, titled APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, is a practical handbook for self-publishing a book and using social media to get the word out and sell copies. CxO Talk is […]

Does it matter if you are popular on LinkedIn?
I am sure that some of us have gotten these really cool e-mails from Linkedin lately helping us put some kind of context around our relative popularity on the internet, or at least on the LinkedIn system. The problem is that being popular on LinkedIn does not matter to me at all. Sure the infographic […]

Social Sales | 10 Social Sales Lead–ership Tips
Sales professionals are some of the earliest adopters and most annoying users of social networking. The problem is that most sales reps treat LinkedIn like a prospecting database for cold calling. To succeed at social sales you must have something to offer beyond your product. You must be someone your prospects want to know.
Trends for Companies Searching for a Social Media “Something” (2013)
Just over two years ago I wrote a post on “Trends for Companies Searching for a Social Media ‘Something’” and I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of these trends a few years later. I used Indeed.com a few years ago but it appears they haven’t updated their system recently […]

Divorce Facebook Style
Who gets the data after a couple gets divorced? You might be surprised at just how much Facebook data plays in a divorce scenario, and if Take this Lollypop didn’t scare you, this should make you stop and think for a minute about data, and who it belongs to. Any good divorce lawyer is going […]