Accelerating Learning in Your Organization

As Peter Senge once observed, “The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.” If this is true, then you can’t find a more valuable free tool than Google Alerts.

With Google Alerts, you can specify a word or phrase for Google to monitor; whenever they see it, they send you an email with a link to the source. Unlike with a Google search, once established an alert brings you breaking news and continues to run forever, or so we thought.

Think about the value of Google alerting you to what your competitors just announced.


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10 Things Not To Do in Social Media

“Social” is not your father’s marketing. When participating in social media and social networking in business, here are 10 basic rules about what not to do:

  1. Don’t get started in social media if you have significant product deficiencies, customer support problems, or even corporate culture issues. Social media makes good businesses more successful and bad businesses bankrupt.
  2. Don’t use social media to explicitly sell. Instead, educate, enlighten, inform, and entertain your audience. In so doing, you’ll position yourself and your company as experts.
  3. Don’t “set it and forget it.” Lack of conversation makes you look worse than not showing up at all.


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Social Media Strategy for Business: 3 Key Points

After leaving TalkShoe.com in 2009 (a live podcasting service that I started in 2005), I decided to write a book about how small and medium-size businesses can most effectively use social media and social networking tools to achieve their goals. That book is called “How Can I Capitalize on Social Media When My Kid Has to Program My DVR – A Busy Executive’s Guide to New Tools No Business Can Afford to Ignore.”

Image: Not Social Media

Thinking back about that book as I begin writing another one, here are the 3 most important things you need to know about “social:”

  1. It’s not about you;


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