Financial social media marketing goes under the microscope as mutual fund researcher Neil Bathon asks, "What is social media really?"

How attractive is San Diego as a place to start a company compared with the Silicon Valley? Santa Barbara? Los Angeles? As a great place to live, it is impossible to beat Southern California. As a place to build a company, the Silicon Valley offers a pool of talent, better access to f...

The ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) today released the Cloud Computing Risk Assessment document.

The document does well

As he put it, "Understand that the Elevator Pitch is Dead. You remember the elevator pitch. The notion that you should be able to describe what your company does in the length of time consumed by the average elevator ride. I’m here to tell you, that’s way too long these days. Elevator ...

First, we have spent an enormous amount of time and money developing our Web site. These days, a Web site is all-consuming. It includes positioning, branding, support, infrastructure, training materials, community development, sales operations, bug reporting. The list goes on. There is...

I found: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Governmentto be a book I couldn’t put down. This great read is about results and how to get them.  And, as the title implies, it focuses on big results in government.  The government is doing many things to the ...

How many times have you seen an employee wave on by a customer when the “security device enclosed” in some item – be it DVD, CD, or clothing – sets off the alarm at the doors? Just a few weeks ago I heard one young lady explain the alarm away with “it must have be the CD I bought at th...

Chances are, if you're not a journalist, you haven't heard of HARO. It stands for Help A Reporter Out, and it's a site that was created to help journalists connect with experts or sources to interview for articles that they're writing. Chances are, you're thinking: OK, but I'm still no...

This is the first of multiple-part series of interviews with David where we’ll look into buyer personnas, marketing tools-to-use and ask the question of whether social media is simply a fad.

Last year, as imploding credit markets roiled the economy, mutual fund organizations throughout the country took stock of their revenue prospects. It was clear that a change or two was in the wind at Denver’s Old Mutual Investment Partners, too. For Chief Executive Officer, D. Bruce Jo...

As reported in DBJ Associates, “The cost of not communicating to advisors and clients through their preferred vehicles (social media) does not make a lot of long-term business sense.” It may be difficult for FINRA to address the social media question since a search of “social media” in...

Many B2B companies know that they should be incorporating an ongoing social media campaign into their arsenal of tactics to generate leads and sales. But, as a business owner or marketing professional, half the battle is trying to get your head around the social media wave, the crushin...

Of course it is now a prerequisite to have a professional web presence for your business. More than likely, you spend time and treasure on this critical resource. But what about a blog? Blogging may just seem like a fad for techies (www.Gizmodo.com) or people that seem to have plenty o...

Mr. Steege’s sense of experimentation, in fact, flew in the face of a recently released report from Equation Research that stated that ”not knowing enough about social media” was given as the #1 reason for not trying it. Mr. Steege readily admitted he knew little about keywords and thi...

Another powerful use of social media and Twitter. LeapFish has teamed up with the Make-a-Wish Foundation to empower Twitter users with the ability to grant an ill child’s dream to go to Disneyland. A Tweet-A-Cause that just hit the wires and is beginning to climb through the Twitosph...

You've seen them. You can see them on this site, those odd little widget-icons that grace the footers an...

It was an early morning at King’s Cross, where I live. Well, used to live would probably be the right term. You see I don’t live in a nice flat or in a big house. I live on the streets. Actually I was a normal hardworking guy just like you. But all that changed when I lost my job earli...

That’s 12 million people engaged in 27.3 million conversations on Twitter every day. They are branding your company even if they are not mentioning you. That kind of branding is called “ignoring the non-entity.” In financial social media marketing and every other industry it’s the bra...

The Obama Administration has decided that Asia matters. Driven primarily by the specter of emerging Chinese economic might, the President is nonetheless embracing the region as a whole.

Set aside his glib use of his childhood years in

Holy cow! The Open Net Initiative, a group that monitors government filtering (= censorship) of the Internet held a book launch at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheik. A poster for the book — Access Controlled — contained the sentence: "The first ...

Google has announced a revised settlement [redlined pdf faq pdf] that it hopes will address the concerns raised by the Department of Justice and many other groups. Here's a summary of the summary Google provides [pdf], although IANAL and I encourage you to read the summary, which ...

What? Leveling the intellectual playing field with Stanford? The home of elite, wealthy and over-privileged? Suddenly I am inside an auditorium at Stanford University, listening to guest lecturers speaking to a class at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

Quit when you're on top, kid. Manny Pacquiao, the Pambansang Kamao ("National Fist") of the Philippines, beat the living tar out of the very tough amigo Miguel Cotto on Sunday afternoon, November 15, 2009, keeping a skein of big victories intact and once again upholding the pride of an...

I don’t know about you, but when I get long emails my eyes go running around my head. Too many words for me to take in during a busy day when I’m sure I’m suffering from some form of ADHD as I try to multitask beyond human capability. So I ask folks to please, please, puLEASE not send ...

Everyone knows that the longevity and ultimate success of a platform lies in the developers willing to create on that platform. Creating a healthy developer ecosystem in which both the developer and the platform vendor can grow and prosper is very important. No one knows this better th...

As economic conditions improve, it will be those managers and organizations that can see opportunities which will flourish. And what we see is a function of how we think. We normally imagine that things work the other way round: that we see, and on the basis of the evidence in front of...

I gave a keynote at theCanadian Marketing Association's Marketing Week conference in Toronto a couple of days ago. It was a new talk, and I tried to structure it carefully. I've gone through my slides, and here's an extended summary of what I said (or meant) in this 35-minute ...

Most businesses have an accounting system that makes sense for them. However, an accounting system by itself is far from an efficiently automated billing process. Because the accounting system usually is a silo that is wholly separate from other operational activities of the company, k...

Businesses provide many different types of fulfillment. Some fulfill by keeping shelves properly stocked, and then delivering from that stock. Some businesses go a step further and manufacture or assemble those products. Others provide professional services such as engineering, case ma...

So you’re ready to redesign your website.  Or maybe you’ve launched a new business and are designing a new site from the ground up.  Congratulations, while this is going to take some effort and involvement on your part — whether you work with an internal team or bring in a firm o...

Studies show that the information and communications technology industry contributes two percent of the world's carbon emissions - that's greater than that of the entire aviation industry. More worryingly, this figure is expected to grow significantly over the next decade.”

Led by Miguel Angel Garay – CEO Central America, AMNET Telecommunications, a consortium of over fifty world telecom leaders united this week in Panama at the illustrious NGT Summit and outlined the ethos that innovation is the key to exploit the inevitable growth.

Over the past couple of years we have visited small business and entrepreneur support organizations in LA (the Convergence Technology Council/CTC), OCTANe in Orange County, the San Diego Software Industry Council/SDSIC in San Diego, and the Silicon Valley Product Management Association...

For me the video below is a well thought out and put together dig at what I have been seeing an explosion of this year and what is concerning me most about personal branding. Lack of depth and authenticity. It is what is causing so many online commentators to rant about it's shallownes...

I have been a long time donor to Kiva.org, a peer microfinance lending site that has been around for several years. When I first heard about it I thought it was an interesting idea and donated some money to fund a few different third-world start up businesses.

CRM is Here to Stay

Plugin for Microsoft Office expands collaboration with Google Apps suite OffiSync is a powerful tool that directly connects Microsoft Office to Google Apps, letting you save your files to Google’s cloud and collaborate with colleagues directly from your desktop application. Toda...

All about Internet Video - How To Post Your Videos to Online Video Hosting Services, The Top Ten Internet Video Hosting Sites, Top Sites to Make Money with Internet Video and How To Post Your Videos to Online Video Hosting Services

A few years ago, I was asked by one of my best sales executives to assist in salvaging a large contract with an Arizona client. The Sales Executive and his team had performed extensive business analytics, developed strong support from the client’s management team and had even received ...