"If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward." I can't locate the originator of that quote; it's been attributed to a few people. Nonetheless, consider this for a moment. There are new start-ups every day—businesses that are bringing new, different and improved services and products to the market. Have you checked on your competition lately, Read more...

I just finished reading an article on Raintoday.com (yes, their weekly newsletter just came out, featuring five of the year's best articles on better serving your clients) that focused on "the power of taking your clients interests to heart." I found this article interesting on a number of levels, but I'll limit my discussion to Read more...

Andrew Sobel has a great article on Raintoday.com that discusses four ways to deliver value to your clients: core value, surprise value, personal value, and perception of value. For many, it may be no more than a refresher, but it never hurts to keep reminding ourselves of how we can improve customer satisfaction. It's a Read more...

As you can tell from the series of posts that I'm making today, I was a bit behind on my reading. But many of these articles were definitely worth my time, like this one on the Silicon Valley WebGuild that shows a survey from the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) 2008 annual "Masters of Marketing" Read more...

I've just returned from an 8 day vacation (I say that, because something about being gone even one day over 1 week makes things more 'serious'!) and am reflecting on how much of a vacation I really got... It's always been very difficult for me to 1) prepare for being away from my business and Read more...

The Wall Street Journal published their list of 50 women executives to watch in 2008, along with some stats on women in corporate-officer jobs. "In her concession speech in June, Hillary Clinton lamented that she wasn't able to "shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling," but she said it now has "about 18 million cracks in Read more...

On smallbusinessnewz, Lisa Braziel posted an article back in February on social media campaign budgets. She concluded with a nice set of questions to ask when determining your budget. "1) What are your overall objectives and campaign timeframe? If the whole objective is to achieve a drastic spike in sales or promote a limited time Read more...

This post on WebProNews by Chris Crum covers the pros and cons of businesses allowing employees to use social media in the workplace. There's some good information to share with clients looking into social media. Make sure to skim through the comments as well for a few good content nuggets. http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/10/27/is-social-media-good-or-bad-for-business

There was an interesting little article on Webguild that looked at the role of social media in an economic downturn. Social Media in the Economic Downturn By Reshma Kumar, November 2, 2008 "Social Media, in light if our current depressed economic climate was a topic of discussion and on the minds of many in attendance Read more...

Don't let the headlines and news stories paralyze you. While there's abundant fear about the economic uncertainty, it's important that we not let anxiety freeze us into inaction. This is especially true if year-end is historically a slower time for some of us. Yes, there are layoff announcements and some companies are putting new hiring Read more...