So, if you ever read my bio (whether here on the blog’s sidebar, or on any of my social networks), you may have noticed that I recently updated my professional description.
Whereas before it was for Bonsai Interactive, as of last week it became Jugnoo, Inc. So, what was the change?
Simple – I’ve stepped down from my role at Bonsai to become Director of Retention and Social Media at Jugnoo, Inc.
While my time at Bonsai was fun, and we were lucky [...]

How smart are you? How do you rack up compared to your peers; your competitors; your parallel people?
There’s all sorts of smart, but only one that counts. It’s not high school diploma. It’s not college degree. It’s not university PhD.
It’s experiential smart.
Your experience. Your knowledge. Your ability to act. Your ability to react. Your ability to pro-act. It’s your fluidity. Your flexibility. Your awareness that smart is not not being dumb; it’s not being the dumbest.
Smart marketers see an opportunity before [...]

A lot of the time, we look at ways we can be outrageously creative.
We think of ways to outshine that viral video our competitor lucked out with. Or we look at the craziest competition we can offer that ties social media, mobile, print and online marketing all into one kickass promo.
Or we think of how many cool features our new product has, and then think how it’d be even cooler to multiply that number by ten and use that as [...]

First, apologies to anyone suffering Klout burnout here – but sometimes a topic has more than just a simple viewpoint. Especially when that topic is something like online privacy. And that privacy has (potentially) been broken by Klout.
I was on Facebook today, and my friend Tonia Ries asked about Klout’s ability to make profiles, when users haven’t connected their details with the service. I pointed her to the response from Megan Berry, Klout’s marketing manager, where she says if we don’t [...]

A couple of months back, I wrote about online influence tool Klout, and their approach to how they build their membership (they use opt-out profiling, versus the more widely-used opt-in).
The main concern I had was the fact it was so difficult to leave Klout if you didn’t want to be seen as endorsing their product. As of today, two months later, my profile is still live, despite requests to be removed.
While the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Empire Avenue allow [...]

I was flying home from Utah earlier this year, and it included a stopover at Houston. The clouds over Houston were super thick, and it seriously looked like we were flying into mashed up cotton wool on our descent approach to the airport.
Because it was an evening flight, it was starting to get pretty dark and you really couldn’t see anything but cloud.
The pilots, for all intents and purposes, were flying blind. They were looking at the same cloud cover [...]

Often, we change things based on what we see in front of us, or based on perceptions of what we feel is in front of us.
It may be that our sales channels are bringing in less than 12 months ago; so we change the sales team or manager.
Or, our customers are leaving in numbers that are scary; so we change the customer service team or manager.
The problem is, often what we see in front of us is a very small [...]

No matter what business you’re in, your success can very often boil down to one thing – your people culture.
You may have the greatest product with the big dollars to promote it, but it’s the people that will really define how successful the product is. This is true for internal people as well as external.
Customers Are Your External People
You need to build trust and loyalty with them.
Get your relationship right with your customers and you’ll be in a far stronger [...]

From the moment we can, we’re forever chasing shadows.
As children, we chase the shadow of ourselves that the streetlight throws in front of us.
As teenagers, we chase the impossible date with the most popular boy or girl.
As adults, we chase the dream job that never happens, or the pot of gold we never reach.
We know – subconsciously or otherwise – that some shadows can never be caught, and yet we chase them anyway. And the damage is catastrophic.
People chase after [...]

Take a moment and ask yourself these two questions:
- How are we encouraging hope in those around us?
- How are we helping to grow the leaders of tomorrow?
I once wrote about the roles of companies needing to team-build differently, and I think some of the ideas mentioned in that post can help.
But they’re not the complete answer – they just look at what companies can do.
We also have to look at what we’re doing every single day, both in our own lives [...]