Today’s blog topic came from my friend Jeff Lipschultz. There’s been a lot of talk (and action) lately centered around “Social Media Interns.” Can you share with us the parameters for having an effective program? Some work for free. Some work remotely. Qualifications? Training required? Return-on-investment (of time/dollars). It won’t come as a surprise to some of you that I don’t think interns should be doing [&hellip... Read More

Last week I read an article on Harvard Business Review called “The Martial Art of Difficult Conversations.” While the author related a personal story to reflect on how to have conflict conversations, it very well applies to business. I hate conflict. I hate hard conversations. I have this innate need to be liked and I used to think that if I had the hard conversations, people [&hellip... Read More

Last week I used the blog to crowdsource some ideas for content here in weeks to come. And the idea worked magically well! You each had great ideas and I’ll be using them here, which also means about 30 seconds of fame for you and a prize! Today I’m going to give you a list of the blogs I read and why I recommend them, which [&hellip... Read More

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 [&hellip... Read More

B.J. Emerson is the face behind the Tasti D-Lite Twitter handle, a frozen dessert company that has a cult-like following in New York City. They’ve begun franchising, in order to bring the cult to other parts of the country, and B.J. is tasked not only with connecting with its highly engaged customers, but also finding new franchisees and building brand awareness in new cities. I’m really [&hellip... Read More

It’s been a while since something in the news has gotten me fired up, but it happened this week. I saw the headline “Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery” and clicked on the story to learn more. I expected it to be another story about using Gen Y to set up social networking, set strategy, and execute. Imagine my surprise, then, when it [&hellip... Read More

Last night I went to write today’s blog post and ended up with writer’s block. As I told Nancy Myrland, the only thing I really wanted to do is snuggle in my flannel sheets with the down comforter and the remote control. Instead, however, I asked my Twitter friends what they would like me to write about and I got some great ideas! * Brad Farris [&hellip... Read More

My husband, a Democrat adviser, joyfully recounted the Obama/FOX feud for me over drinks on Friday night. He hates FOX. So much so, that he changes my brother’s preset stations on both his TV and radio every time we’re in Denver. He won’t even stay in the Admiral’s Club while we’re traveling if the station is on. So you can imagine his glee when he heard [&hellip... Read More

Yesterday I moderated a social media monitoring and measuring panel for PRSA Chicago. Amber Naslund from Radian6, Brandon Noel from AllState, and Ian Sohn from Ogilvy 360 Digital were the panelists…and they were really good! We talked a lot about both monitoring and measuring social media, but one of the points that kept coming up was “how do I sell this to my executive team, including [&hellip... Read More