Today I am grateful for my friend Sara Wilson, who is a fantastic writer with a very curious mind. Following is an exerpt of an interview she did with me on how the franchise industry is using social media (I’ve changed to businesses here for purpose of reaching a larger audience).

Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich, believes that, as long as employees abide by a general code of conduct, they should be free to establish their own social media presence. “I don’t advocate companies maintain control of social media, just like they shouldn’t maintain control of e-mail, phone calls, and what is or isn’t said at a cocktail party at a trade show,” says Dietrich. “If there is an online code of conduct, training, and a toolkit given to all employees on how to get started and where to spend their time, social media will work the way it’s supposed to — by allowing customers, employees, and stakeholders online access to the people with whom they do business.”

Read the entire article on AllBusiness.com.

Today I have a guest blog post on Find Your Nerve, the brain child of my friend Steve McKee.

Steve runs an ad agency in Albuquerque, McKee Wallwork Cleveland, and is the author of “When Growth Stalls.” A couple of months he called me and said, “The economists claim the recession is over, but what are we, as business owners, doing to reinstate spending?” And then he threw the idea of Find Your Nerve past me.

The result is a blog dedicated to business owners who are not letting the recession keep them down, but doing what they can to change the status quo.

Rather than cannoblize our readers, I’ll give you an excerpt from my post today here and you can go check out his blog for more.

One year ago, my company had a couple of “life-changing” events. Each of them, alone, could have put us out of business. They both happened within six weeks of each other. I went into a pretty deep depression. I beat myself up. Why didn’t I pay attention to the signs? How did I not know our industry is a key leading indicator of the economy? Why did I do some things my gut told me not to do? Were people going to think that I had a good three year run, but I couldn’t grow a business beyond that? How was I going to tell my staff we had to close? How was I going to tell our clients? How was I going to pay our outstanding vendor bills? Why had I built a business only to have nothing to show for it?

Read more here and check out the other guest bloggers, as well!