Reading about your products a little too often on Facebook? Useful information can include advice about not doing business with your company, and conversations, I can assure you, frequently concern vendors. More and more small business owners are jumping into LinkedIn groups, Facebook and Twitter, not just to drive business but to connect with other business people and ask questions about, say, your products. They’re wandering the halls of your business right now. Do people say bad things about your company online? mean really bad things? MORE >>

Apparently there are 5,700 Facebook users who are happy to like what I’m suspecting is a subdivision of townhouses in Narnia. In addition to keeping bad Thai restaurants in business, focus groups catch things like forgetting to include basic information, making it difficult to find basic information and alienating your target market by hiding said information behind a contest wall. This ad has been running in my local paper lately. It speaks of a Secret place with golf balls, attractive people who eat outside and race cars. would like to go to this place. The what? a Secret. MORE >>

Carol also has time to connect with business people through her Facebook page. Do you want to see Carol’s Facebook page? I am sure there are sales people out there who can write.  I just don’t know where they are.  And neither do you.  I am considering sacrificing a goat in the parking lot so the Productivity Prevention Geeklords will disable the Outlook Send function for all the sales people who have my name. If you have done this, I would be interested to hear how it went. Let’s review why we should never, ever let sales people write marketing emails. MORE >>

Your summer just became an endless search for things to keep the student busy, because even if you stack up all those tiny tasks you keep wishing would just get done, they probably amount to a week of work, if that. have a few teenagers kicking about my house and, as far as I can tell here is what they know how to do: they can make Kraft Dinner (they cannot clean up afterward), they can use Facebook, Tumblr, MineCraft and YouTube all at the same time, while lip synching the dialogue from a Family Guy episode they’ve seen 36 times. How do you keep Skippy busy? MORE >>

This is the only possible explanation I can find for the repeated inability of most businesses to get their customers up and running properly. This is for those of you who work for a consumer-centric company that also happens to have business customers. It’s hard enough to get the perky teenage models off the sell sheets and replace them with men in suits, but it’s even trickier to get stuff done when your call centre greets business people with their first name and asks about the weather. If you sell to businesses, you need to be set up to sell to businesses. MORE >>