As social media continues its assault onto the mainstream audience, one of the side-effects has been the emergence of the view that marketing isn’t allowed in the space. Conversations on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere are vocal in the opinion that marketing is dead; we choose who we buy from and whose reputation we ruin; what gets our eyeballs and what doesn’t. Simply put, old school is dead; long live the King (of new media school). And, to a degree,…

Last week, I asked for your help in coming up with a name for a new series I’m starting on the blog. With more than 80 comments (some including multiple suggestions), it was really hard to choose from the very awesome names you came up with. After a sifting process and a lot of back and forth over the final few, the new series is going to be called Sunday Brunch, as suggested by Phil McDonnell. The name is the…

Breaking out on your own is hard. Just ask anyone that runs their own business, and you can pretty much guarantee that the one answer that will be consistent across the board is that it’s hard to be your own boss. No guaranteed pay-check; no water-cooler conversations to split the day up; no big corporate budgets for projects and pitches. But no-one said it would be easy. It takes hard work, commitment, lots of compromise and hard knocks to get…

There’s a lot of talk about relationships in business, and how to make business more human. There’s also a lot of talk about how businesses need to be more like friends, and treat people the way you would your friends if you want to succeed. Add in the view that businesses and their clients should be friends as well, and you could be forgiven for thinking you need to be either Ross or Rachel and sipping coffee in Central Perk…

While you might come here to read about social media; or marketing; or strategy; or statistics;  it’s always nice to step back and read blogs from outside the business and social media circle. So, over on my Facebook page last night, I asked for recommendations of blogs that weren’t business, to see what inspired others when they read. And boy, did the recommendations fly in! So, without further ado, here are 21 non-business blogs you could add to your reader…

Footprints in the sand are fleeting – a transient snapshot in time that disappear when the tide comes in. Even the footprints that are further in eventually become invisible alongside a million other footprints. But for that moment in time, they’re physical. They’re proof that you did something. That you existed. Some folks might say that footprints in the sand don’t matter because they wash away. That no matter how you spin it, the lack of physical proof of you…

There’s a lot of news about disclosure online at the minute. I’ve written about it a ton of times (and spoke about it over at Joe Hackman’s radio show), and smart bloggers like Lorelle are giving some great tips on how bloggers (and other online network users) should go about disclosing their affiliate or professional relationships (thanks to Christina Kingston for the heads-up on Lorelle’s post). It’s becoming even more important as the U.K. joins the U.S. in cracking down…

You’ve become lazy. You’re no longer smart. You’re a shadow of the clever person you really could be. Don’t feel bad – I am too. We all are. We used to be questioning; now we just ask questions. Blame social media. Actually, don’t – blame social media and crowdsourcing. Penned by Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired Magazine article, crowdsourcing does exactly what it says on the tin – allows us to source a crowd for an answer. Want to know where…

Beginning on Sunday January 30, I’ll be running an ongoing series on the blog that answers a new question each week from you, the readers. It might be on strategy; marketing; building loyalty; business; blogging; social media; and more. Originally I was going to call it Sunday School, since it’ll be posted on a Sunday and it will have an educational slant (yeah, I know, not very original). But then I was thinking some folks might think it’s a religious…

Location based (or geo-located) marketing is getting a huge amount of buzz at the minute, as Twitter apps connect location tweets to its service, Foursquare is credited with Domino’s Pizza’s UK success and smartphone users get ready for augmented reality to guide their leisure time. And then there’s Facebook’s continued assault on world domination with its new Places app. All good stuff. And yet… For the most part, we’re still being safe and boring when it comes to how we, as marketers, use…