Social Media DOES Help Your Search Ranking (Just Not Your SEO)

I love presenting at conferences and seminars because while I’m teaching, I always end up learning something, too. I was reminded of this at a presentation I gave recently for small business owners at the Small Business Development Center in downtown Phoenix. The title of my workshop was “Tune Up Your Site for Search Engines,”…

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Four Ideas for Marketing Travel in a Tough Economy

With the typically busy travel weekend of July 4th looming, I thought I’d take a look around the Webs and take the temperature of the industry. There’s good news and bad news, and I have a few ideas to share on how to tune your marketing during a down economy. AAA projects a decrease of…

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Create Your Portable Personal Marketing Campaign

(This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in Process, June 2009) You’re not going to have that job forever. I’m sorry, but you’re not. Business is undergoing fundamental and sweeping change, and one of the consequences is that there are no more “lifers” – not in middle management, not on the factory floor,…

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Canning Your Own Spam

(This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in Southwest Graphics, Summer 2007) It’s safe to say we all hate spam (the junk mail, not the snack meat). Yet you and I understand that marketing by email is an effective and affordable way to reach potential and current customers. So how do we write,…

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The Hunt for a Unique Domain Name

(This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in Southwest Graphics, Winter 2008) I used to complain that the most difficult task in marketing was naming a company or product. The process is always highly subjective, fraught with the pitfalls of connotation, innuendo, vernacular, and slang, complicated by trademark searches and translation issues. Then…

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Bury the Bad News – or Take Control?

You may have seen me quoted in the June 20 issue of the Phoenix Business Journal in the article Companies using technology to bury bad news. The article discusses the practice of trying to bury bad news online by pushing it down in search engine results. My quote is just a small part of the…

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Twitter is My Personal Clipping Service

Over the weekend, my wife handed me a newspaper article about independent music in Phoenix. As I skimmed the article I realized two things: This was the first newspaper I’d touched in weeks I already knew about the article and the “jist of it” The first realization was not surprising; I’ve used NPR and the…

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