Today’s guest post is written by Lisa Gerber.

As I write this, it’s the morning after Christmas. Boxing Day. We’re cleaning out the boxes here. Getting ready for the weekend, New Years, and more importantly taking advantage of down time to clean out.

I love this time of year. It’s quiet everywhere. My house is quiet, the blogosphere is quiet, and my newsfeed is full of comatose friends needing to detox after a hedonist season. We’ re cleaning out closets, basements, inboxes, and Facebook friends. Continue Reading »

Today’s guest post is written by Erika Napoletano. 

No, this post isn’t about a crappy pickup line or some other awkward online dating experience.

In all honesty, it’s the result of a pretty awesome dating experience (at least one that doesn’t involve a guy showing up at my house drunk with a gun – but I digress – and yes, that actually happened).

Still digressing.

Over assorted plates of sushi and sake, a date and I were debating about The Number – the dollar amount – that it would take to divert you from doing something you love to something you didn’t necessarily want to do.

A brief yet lively discourse resulted in a split decision: He believed everyone has a number while I did not. Continue Reading »

Today’s guest post is written by Rieva Lesonsky.

Although I’m a bit superstitious, I’m going to go ahead, channel iconic 1950s television personality (and songwriter, who knew?) Steve Allen, and say I think 2012 is going to “be the start of something big.”

I know there are naysayers out there who will disagree, and point out the numerous reasons I’m being too much of a Pollyanna, but frankly I don’t care. There are plenty of signs the economy is finally on the rebound.

Consumer confidence (as measured by The Conference Board) soared in November (December’s numbers won’t be out until the end of the month) to 56 (on a scale of 100), from 40.9 in October.

Although 56 indicates consumers are still feeling fairly uncertain, a 15-point jump in a month is a good sign, which is amplified by the “Expectations Index” part of the survey hitting 67.8, an increase of nearly 18 points in a month. Continue Reading »

One of my best friends is the manager for the Obesity Prevention Program for the State of Alaska. She has uncovered the secret to losing weight and has a FABULOUS idea for a book on the subject. It’s called, Eat Less, Exercise More.

The end.

I know, it’s a radical idea, and we laugh so hard every time we talk about it. And how huge this book could be in sales, if there were anything more to add, other than the title, but there isn’t. That is how you lose weight. It takes a long time, and there is no SHORT CUT.

My father used to call it the Strawberry Short Cut – it works when you’re driving from Point A to Point B (sometimes), but it doesn’t work when you’re trying to get from Point A to Point B, like say, from obscurity to the cover of Entrepreneur.

I use that example because Gini Dietrich and I always talk about what we’ll wear for our cover photo shoot when we get there.

And the funny thing, my other BFF, Dana Hughens, texted me the other day joking about an incident that will be retold in her Entrepreneur interview some day.

So I bet there are a lot of you out there with similar dreams. And none of us will make it happen by taking the short cut. Continue Reading »

Jeannie Walters has been focused on the customer experience for more than 15 years, consulting to companies big and small on their retention strategies. She is principal at 360Connext, a speaker, and mom to two young boys.

As humans, we like to fool ourselves. At best, it’s a way to be kind to ourselves (“It’s ok to eat this on vacation!”) and at worst a way to maintain excuses (“I’m too tired to exercise”).

As business leaders, however, it can be the worst kind of risky.

When you try to look at your own project, business, or even employees without a sharply tuned critical eye, you end up with a viewpoint that inevitably provides some data, but not necessarily the right kind.

I evaluate other organizations’ experiences every day. I work hard to maintain a true third-party perspective, because I know what happens when you’re on the inside looking further in. You make assumptions, based on history. You acknowledge success based on completing a project, whether it is working for your customers, or the business, or not. You hear what you want to hear from existing customers and employees, regardless of what they’re really trying to tell you. Continue Reading »

I received my copies of “The Now Revolution” last Thursday. While I’ve had a few days to dig into it, I’m not quite finished reading it so am not ready to give you a review.

What I will tell you, though, is I have lots of pages dog eared and lots of notes in the margins. So you’re going to get a full-on review when I finish. None of this scanning stuff. I’m actually reading every word.

But, I didn’t want you to have to wait for me to finish so you can enter the contest to receive your very own free copy of Jay Baer’s and Amber Naslund’s new book.

You may have heard that they gave two copies to 75 bloggers to give away to their readers. I get to keep one (the one I’ve marked up) and I get to give the second one away.

The catch? You have to enter a contest.

The best part? I get to decide the contest.

If you’re new here, you don’t know how much we love our contests. We love our contests!

It sort of began in November when the Arment Dietrich Facebook page hit 1,000 “likes” and we wanted to celebrate those who have come along on our crazy journey. We held a photo contest and gave away a Flip camera. John Heaney won that one with “Legally Gini.”

Just last week, we held a contest to name our top five stories of the week blog post (Barry Silver won with Gin and Topics) and we gave away a copy of Branding Yourself by Kyle Lacy and Erik Deckers.

And now we get to give away “The Now Revolution.” Continue Reading »

Joel Libava, The Franchise King,® is the president of Franchise Selection Specialists Inc, a franchise consulting/advisory firm.

For some people, the word “change,” is one of the scariest words in the English language. Some people get all weak in the knees, with just the thought of possibly having to change one or two things in their lives. Others thrive on it. I think that I’m the latter.

Before I get into my own experience with change, I’d like to talk about Gini. Gini Dietrich.

I “met” Gini about 2.5 years ago. I was a paid blogger over at AllBusiness.com, and I saw her name mentioned in a post about social media. Being the social guy, I started to “follow” her around. (Not that kind of following around.) Continue Reading »

Well, the FCC has made their decision on net neutrality and we are now faced with two versions of the web. One where we are protected on our computers, but not on our phones. Which means we can gain access to anything we want if we’re using our browsers, but the wireless carriers can block apps if they want (i.e. AT&T could block Yelp or Verizon could block Facebook).

The rules are, at best, “net semi-neutrality,” according to the New York Times. The rules are bogus, according to Gini Dietrich.

I’ve been pretty outspoken about the need to maintain net neutrality for several months now. I’ve blogged about it and, when I speak, I advise business leaders to pay careful attention to the rulings. I even included it in my trends to pay attention to for 2011. If the neutrality goes away, the way we conduct business will be changed forever. Continue Reading »

When I speak, my audiences are typically white men over the age of 50 and the vast majority of them don’t believe (or don’t want to believe) the web is changing not only the way we do business, but the way we communicate with one another. I always hear, “Oh my kids shop online” or “My younger employees use Facebook” but they believe the use of the web really is for the kids.

Because of that attitude, I always lead up to a very important point when speaking to that particular audience. It’s the issue of control. You see, the use of the web (not just social media, but the web) hasn’t been adopted yet by these audiences because they’re hanging on to to the one thing they think they can’t live without…and that’s control. Continue Reading »

One of my favorite blogs is Harvard Business Review, not because I wish I’d gone to school there, but because they discuss really interesting ideas that aren’t echoed in the social media chamber (as Mark Schaefer calls it).  A couple of weeks ago, Warren Berger, the author of GLIMMER and GlimmerSite, wrote a post about using design thinking during business planning, in order to develop innovative and uber-creative products or services (think iPad and Nike+).

The post, titled The Four Phases of Design Thinking, explores question, care, connect, and commit as ways to relate to our customers, but also as a way to give us the ability to “fail forward,” or take risks that could produce failure in order to make the idea even better. Continue Reading »