My repetitive stress syndrome is becoming so painful that I went entirely ergonomic this week -- keyboard, mouse and mouse pad -- but not without some The keyboard arrived first but the software for the extra features needed to identify the mouse, and since I hadn't yet received the mouse, ... more

Doing business overseas just got tougher, at least for some. Think I'm kidding? See for yourself by visiting The World Bank Group's Doing Business Click on the Ease of Doing Business Rank You'll see that the USA is ranked No. 3 (Singapore No. 1 and New Zealand No 2), but ... more

Have you noticed the new Wall Street Journal ad campaign yet? "Every journey needs a Journal" uses celebrities from the spectrum of industries (Sheryl Crow and Jake Burton, to Alice Waters and Oscar De La Hoya), who are telling their histories -- with the relevant news tied in along the ... more

Current styles find lots of sites copying what I can only call Web2.0-ish designs drawn from some of the more popular blog templates. While I personally kind of like this style, I wonder if enough business owners question what look and feel, as well as content and features, really makes ... more

more

I read a great article in a recent issue of Fast , titled No Accounting for that I urge all marketers to read. The article profiles 's highly-regarded, much-talked-about, resident design expert, Chuck Jones, and topic du how consumer product companies can gauge the financial return (ROI) that an investment ... more

More and more companies are adding a blog to their marketing efforts. That's the good news. The bad news is, many of these companies aren't using their blogs as a tool to engage their customers, but rather as an extension of their Web site, as a way to simply promote ... more

I imagine a fair number of you read the cover story on Toyota's (reg. required) in The New York Times this past Sunday. What I loved was that much of what was highlighted about the car manufacturer's success had to do with their management team's more Throughout Jon Gertner's article, ... more

Jet this past week has joined the ranks of airlines who have had an operational melt-down with the results landing in a heap in their customers' laps. Unfortunate timing this is, too, since many families are traveling as it is mid-winter break for many Suffering cancelled flights, long lines of ... more

You have to give credit to Jet Blue CEO, David , who appeared on the Today Show yesterday morning for an interview with Matt After a week of havoc caused by the snowstorm of the season, Neeleman took matters in hand and has created his airline's Customer Bill of Rights ... more

To be honest, in more than 12 years running my own firm, I've only fired two clients. Both because I misjudged their values before taking on the work, and then discovered they required things of me that I would not But recently several of my marketing friends have expressed frustration ... more

MarketingProfs has 242,471 members, and I love 242,468 of them. A few are I communicate by email and phone with a huge number of our customers, and once in a while someone knocks me sideways with hostility. As much as I'd like to sometimes, I know NOT to respond with ... more

Even if you're serving the same group of customers, their needs may have changed. This may mean having to change some deep-rooted Ireland is my home. However, there are certain things about Ireland that drive me crazy. For the sake of my mental health, I avoid buying a newspaper. Whenever ... more

It's Presidents' Day, an appropriate time to provide commentary on the presidential hopefuls' interactive strategies. For the first time in history, a presidential hopeful's Web site has become the most critical communications vehicle, equivalent to what the television was for the 1952 Incidentally, 2008 is the first election since 1952 ... more

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is spearheading a movement of major universities to put online lecture notes, coursework and required readings for MBA courses and other classes on the internet–for no charge! Why would prestigious universities consider giving away some of their intellectual property? The answer might surprise According to ... more

I often use the Daily Fix to rant about my poor customer service experiences. But this time, I feel it's only fair to pay tribute to one company that rates high in my books -- the one that warrantied my laptop -- In 2004, before my son headed off to ... more

I recently delivered a brief presentation on how women buy and what role storytelling -- or interpersonal narrative -- has in the process. In the course of becoming more aware of current examples of brands that are using this form, I noticed an ad on the in-flight television as I ... more

So now you know how I feel about doing spec work to win new business, eh? It's something we abandoned a long time ago, for many The main one being that if we did the spec and won the account, we spent the next 6-12 months trying to recoup the ... more

Last week, Chicago Tribune reporter Mary Umberger called me for a about new media and... of all things, real estate. I suddenly had a My first job out of college was as a reporter for a weekly business newspaper in Boston called the Banker & . I wrote about banking ... more

How do you take your business global? This Valentine's Day, let me count the Hope you find it useful in taking on the 50 Ways To Go more

Coffee drinkers are pretty passionate about their favorite brews. As freelance NYC writer Carol Vinzant recently wrote in an "After Starbucks proved that Americans were willing to spend more for a better–or at least fancier–cup of coffee, everyone wanted in on what is now an $8.4 billion retail coffee market. ... more

I've been ranting in a series of posts lately about what should be expected of marketing experts (and of course what we should expect from ourselves). Fiona Czerniawska's article on thought leadership last week from Mike McLaughlin's fantastic Management Consulting News brought new Czerniawska reported on her research about the ... more

In an age of instant messaging, you should take a lot more than an instant to consider what exactly it is you're communicating. tell us that controversial bloggers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa , hired by the John Edwards US presidential , are in trouble. Their previous blog posts are being ... more

I was on my annual, too-short, snowboarding trip this past week, and came upon a great coffee shop in Breckenridge, CO (comfy couches and little nooks). While standing at the counter, I picked up a fancy brochure thing produced by American Express, entitled something like "the insider's guide to When ... more

more