I’ve been thinking a lot about collaborative marketing lately, and how we can turn co-existing businesses more into partners and less about missed opportunities. I think there’s a great untapped market for someone that really wants to grab collaborative marketing and run with it. For example – imagine you’re going on a trip. You have to fly to get there, so there are a few processes you need to go through before, during and after: Buying your ticket. Driving to the…

I’m a little tired. Not physically. I could always do with a little more sleep, but then so can everyone. No. I’m more tired about the constant “The End of PR”, “The End of Marketing”, “The End of Print” and “The End of Advertising” missives  that seem to be flying about at the minute. I can’t open my email subscriptions without the latest link shouting out “The end of…. Where now for Industry X?”. I’m an avid blog reader and use Alltop regularly to…

We buy products and services every day. Some we need, some we don’t. But we’ve heard good things about them so we buy them. Who have we heard good things from? Our friends. Our family. Our colleagues. People we trust. Why do we trust them? Because they’re not a mystery to us. They don’t wear masks. They don’t hide behind veils. They don’t try and fool us with trickery. They simply are. You’re in business. You have a blog. You…

Back at the end of 2008, I had an idea for doing something through social media to help charities. Thanks to some amazing friends and people like you that supported with your time and donations, that idea turned into a great example of how we can all make change if we really want to. The 12for12k project has raised over $100,000 for various charities to date – an amazing figure, given the “buy-in” was deliberately low, and the project took…

Over at Jugnoo, our goal is to help educate business owners on the social web, and really help them both understand and improve their visibilty on it. Part of our approach is to offer resources that will act as a go-to for news, best practices, tips and awareness for all the various parts that make up today’s business scene. Recently, we launched the first salvo in this in the form of Social CRM Insider. A blog dedicated to the increasingly important area of…

If you take a look at a list of the oldest companies in the world, you’ll see the glaringly obvious fact that the majority of the companies listed are Japanese. Germany makes a good argument for having a fair few, while the U.S. begins a late charge once they broke away from British rule. The rest is a mish-mash of European countries and developing countries (at least in the later part of the list). So why does Japan have such a…

What do people think of you when they first meet you? What do you think their immediate impression is? If it’s personally, you might not care too much – after all, to each their own, right? But what if you’re a business offering a service – does that change your train of thought? Does the view of the same new face now hold more sway? Even more so, what if your service is one that defines people’s first impressions of…

For many of us, long term vision can be a scary concept. This is understandable, because it usually means that we’re having to put faith in something we’re doing now not showing a return until much later. This could be our businesses; our blogs; or our budding relationship with a new lover. It’s scary, because while we believe in our hearts that everything will work out, often we get impatient for results that we can see now. We want our business to be profitable right away;…

The great thing about blogging is that you get to meet so many smart people. While a post might start the conversation, the comments take it in a whole new direction altogether, and makes a post better for it. As well as blog comments offering the opportunity to read the views of these smart people, they also allow us to check out more of their writing, thanks to plugins like CommentLuv. I’ve discovered some really great bloggers through comments left…

Over on Twitter, Toronto police are using the #RIDE hashtag to counter drunk driving this holiday period. Standing for Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere, #RIDE aims to educate against drunk driving, and offer alternatives from the Toronto police on getting home safely. You’d think it’s a great use of Twitter, and an important topic to be aware of, especially at this time of year. And it would be – except for the shitdiots that have hijacked the #RIDE hashtag and begun…