The following post is an excerpt from my chapter in Danny Iny’s new book, Engagement From Scratch: How Super Community Builders Create a Loyal Audience and How You Can Do the Same. It features lessons in community building and content marketing from the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Brian Clark, Mitch Joel, Kristi Hines, Gini Dietrich and many more. A review of the book will appear later this week. I Would Have Posted Less Frequently I started off writing a blog…

Last week, Jay Baer wrote a post about how brands are responding on social media. Jay’s premise was that companies that can respond within minutes on the social sphere are sending out a far more positive message than those that dilly-dally. It’s a really interesting read, and the comments after the post sparked a great debate about Jay’s premise, and if we weren’t setting companies up to fail by jumping to action as soon as their name is mentioned. One of…

It’s been a while since I did any book reviews here. Mainly because many of the business books I read in 2011 were okay, but nothing to write home about. Thankfully that changed with the release of Brand Against the Machine, by John Morgan, which you can read about here, and easily one of my favourite business books of the last 18 months or so. Joining John’s book is Humanize, by Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter, one of the best social…

It’s been a while since I did any book reviews here. Not that there weren’t a ton of books that could be reviewed – 2010 and 2011 saw more social media and marketing books released than there are reasons for Klout to exist. Probably. But so many of them said the same thing, or seemed to be just a collection of blog posts reformatted for print, that it seemed pointless to share here, since you could easily find more value…

One of the things we always talk about in this space we share is support. How we can encourage our online communities to rise to challenges and how the players on the field encourage others. Yet what are we doing offline with our “immediate communities”? Are we offering the same support and encouragement to them? Or even thanking them for their support and encouragement to us? Often we take this support for granted – after all, they’re our friends and…

Fact – too many businesses still need to wake up and realize that social media is not “one of these Internet fads” that will disappear. Fact – because of this mindset, too many businesses are potentially missing out on extra business that could mean the difference between staying afloat and going under. So why the problem? One of the main reasons is that businesses – whether it’s the CEO, top-tier management or otherwise – are looking at social media as…

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…

This is a guest post by Stacey Acevero. The rise of social media has created all sorts of new opportunities for small business marketers to get the word out, but it has presented challenges too. The days of sending press releases to media outlets with the hopes of being lucky enough to get some coverage are long gone, morphing into constant opportunities to catch the next social media sharing phenomenon. Today, it’s not enough to hit just those traditional media…

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…

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…