In the weeks leading up to the Direct Marketing Association annual conference in Boston this week, exhibitors were out strutting their best stuff. In the weeks leading up to DMA, vendors contacted me with offers of movie tickets, gift cards and a chance to win an iPad. Last week I got two letters in the mail that appeared to be personally addressed to me in a feminine hand (right). Both turned out to be promotions for companies exhibiting at the conference. One employs people to hand-address envelopes so that they appear to come from a friend. They fooled me good. Dump the Junk. MORE >>

suggest in my presentation that there are several initiatives IT could lead that would give them a critical role in social business. I’m presenting a session at the CIO Solutions Gallery at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University  tomorrow on the topic of “Measuring Social ROI: The CIO’s Role.” The ” The subject got me thinking about a topic that’s close to my heart, which is the low profile IT executives have assumed in driving social business at their organizations. Not surprisingly, marketing topped the list. MORE >>

If you lead with your wall, you’re missing an opportunity. Fitness has a variety of other offers on its Facebook presence, but it leads with the simplest one. Most small businesses are terrible at marketing in general and online marketing in particular. That’s understandable: The founders are usually more passionate about what they do than about promoting themselves. But with Facebook becoming the place you just have to be for businesses of all sizes, a little marketing know-how comes in handy. That’s the herd mentality at work. Sounds simple but it ain’t necessarily so. MORE >>

While some of that was a byproduct of the Y2K problem, their willingness to lead such mission-critical projects was a feather in their cap. The disconnect between CIOs and the emerging world of social business became clear to me at a conference I attended about two years ago. entered the room late, but figured I could quickly catch up on the proceedings by checking the Twitter stream of attendees. With an estimated 300 senior IT executives in the room, I expected there would be plenty of chatter going on. To my surprise, not a single tweet had been logged during the past hour. MORE >>

This makes LinkedIn a compelling new tool for professional networking and lead generation. I prepared summaries for my upcoming Search & Social Double Whammy seminar on May 2 in Burlington, MA describing the “big three” social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. My goal was to describe in plain English the way these networks provide value to their users and the metaphors they use for interaction. Perhaps you’ll find these basic explanations useful in some context. And if I’ve missed or misstated anything, I’d appreciate your corrections. MORE >>