Do you need a parachute when you jump out of a plane? Every business, if they engage in social media, needs a policy in place.

It’s a common debate among folks in the PR world: What makes more sense: obtaining my APR or getting an MBA? Before we get into this discussion, note that I earned my APR a number of years ago. I do not have my MBA (although I took one class at the University of St. Thomas [...]

People are asking for social media tips and tools and tricks so here’s a few more teasers for you. Twitter is fun but it can also be very useful for your business. I’m no expert and never claim to be a Twitter “expert”, that phrase actually bithers me a fair bit as it seems to [...]

My old friend Marcia Conner pointed me to this great piece yesterday Investing at the Bottom of the Ladder that discussed how “Companies that invest in their lowest-level employees are more productive and more profitable”. Personally I found this cheering and a nice counterpoint to the outsource everything, always reduce costs no matter what mindset [...]

In the world of the social Web, product recommendations by individuals seems to be gaining more credibility that those by the product producers. But do employees tend to recommend the products that their company produces? This is a question that Matt Brown asks in the Forrester report, Do Your Employees Advocate For Your Company? It [...]

Last fall local Minneapolis integrated brand agency, Fast Horse, started its Intern-for-A-Day program. The premise? To give students and recent grads an insight into agency life at Fast Horse–and a way for the agency to get to know these students/grads better before hiring them full-time. What is also interesting about Fast Horse’s approach is they [...]

One of the wonderful things about the web is that most of the world’s information is accessible online. Better still, a large portion of the world has access to all of that information. Search engines play a huge role in making it easy to sift through that information and find the stuff you are looking [...]

When it comes to networking, most of the advice that you see for small business owners is like Nike’s great but relatively unhelpful slogan: Just Do It. Sure, networking is great – but how can you “just do it” most effectively? The challenge isn’t how you can find more opportunities to network, but how to [...]

Fiction writers are taught to avoid some words and phrases whenever possible.  Stories shouldn’t have lots of events happen “suddenly,” for example, and cliches like “dark and stormy night” are out of the question.  But there are even more terms that businesspeople should shun, and we’ve highlighted some of them below. Megan Jones, a director [...]