Strawberries are one of my all-time favorite foods. As a kid, every year my siblings and I would go with our father to pick strawberries at a farm in Ohio. We’d take our baskets out into the field and work our way down a row, picking only the perfectly ripe berries. The smell of berries [...]

Who Do You Believe?

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by Robert Croll on December 30, 2011

I spoke with a prospective client on the phone today, and the conversation made me remember the importance of really understanding our goals. She’s a successful businessperson, pretty adept at marketing despite the fact that’s not her background, and she’s done fairly well with her e-commerce business. But, she knows that she’s made mistakes along [...]

Getting the Easy Questions Wrong. What’s Wrong With Search?

September 11, 2011
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I’m thinking of visiting my family for Thanksgiving this year. Needing to confirm the date, I did what seemed like the sensible thing to do; I went to the search engines. Alas, I may have been better off pulling out a real calendar. My search engine of choice is Google. I typed ‘when is thanksgiving [...]

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Bouncing Around the SERPs

August 8, 2011
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Recently, a colleague posted a celebrity lookalike photo of her kids on Facebook. Needing a break, I thought I’d try it too, especially since people are always telling my daughter that she looks like Rachel from Glee. Since there was no clear link to where the celebrity mashups had come from, I went to Google [...]

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Integrated Marketing – Getting It Right Is Hard

August 1, 2011
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Today, I received a really terrific piece in the mail from Banana Republic. Now, let me say upfront that most of these kinds of mailers usually go directly from the mailbox into the trash, but this one was different. Mad Style. Introducing the Limited Edition Banana Republic Mad Men Collection. To be honest I don’t [...]

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Review of Nimble Social CRM

July 18, 2011
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Social network fatigue. If you spend a significant amount of time online, as I do, you’ve probably experienced it too. Not just the ‘should I share this on Facebook or Twitter or both?’ question, but the ‘how can I possibly keep up with all this and still get anything done?’ question. I love social media. [...]

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Is Plus Finally Taking Google Into Social in a Real Way?

July 5, 2011
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This past week, Google rolled out Google+ to select users for a wide-scale beta test. Google+ is the search giant’s latest attempt at breaking into social networking, something it’s tried several times (and failed at) in the past. This latest venture, though, has been met with significantly less scorn than Buzz or Wave or any [...]

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Lifestyle Design – It’s Not for Everyone

June 27, 2011
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I’ve noticed an interesting phenomena that seems to be growing over the past several years. There’s a LOT of advice encouraging people to ‘follow their bliss’ by doing their own thing, and not bowing to the pressure of ‘getting a job.’ I think this is terrific in many ways: Control – You’re in control of [...]

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Facebook ‘Recommend’ – The Power of a Word

June 20, 2011
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There are so many great opportunities for expanding your reach online, and more come out every day. But, one of the issues I’ve noticed recently is that some offers, which may – (or may not) – be great services don’t have a good handle on what they’re asking from their potential customers. I believe they’re [...]

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The Why-I’ve-Failed-To-Blog Post

June 14, 2011

It happens. Really great bloggers fail to publish some of the time, so you’re gonna have to cut me some slack. So much great stuff going on that I haven’t had time to write a decent post in a while. And I still don’t, so instead I’m just going to do a quick rundown of [...]

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