Out of all the social media platforms I use, Twitter presents me with the biggest challenge.  I’m not really a 140-character, headline kind of guy.  I do my best thinking in paragraphs, not clever one-liners.  However, I’ve always had good traction with my (very small) Twitter audience, so I decided one of my goals for 2012 is to increase my Twitter following by 300%.  That sounds like a lot, but I  started  with ...

So the Post Office has announced some major changes to fight off the billions of dollars of debt they’ve accumulated doing business.  The three biggest changes are laying off about 28,000 workers, raising the price of stamps by a penny and making sure your first class mail takes longer to get to it’s destination. Now look, I admit I’m not an MBA.  I’m not a CEO of a fortune 50 company.  I haven’t even slept at a Holiday Inn Express recently.  And here at Meaning ...

Last week I wondered on the Meaning To Work Facebook page, how a journal article could be written by 6 different people, yet I could  barely get through the thing because of the terrible writing.  And it’s had me thinking the last few days – why is that? Why are so many journal articles terribly written? I’d like to think that people are just poor writers.  I’d like to think that the 6 researchers are scientists first and writers second (or in this case, 101st).  Brilliance in science ...

I’m not a person who believes the “customer is always right.”  Actually I think the customer is wrong a lot.  Sometimes the customer may even be an idiot.  On the other hand, I do believe that companies should work to develop relationships.  To make the lives of both customers and employees more productive and more fulfilling.  It was for these reasons I started a series called “how not to run a website.” I don’t actually like writing these types of columns.  Who wants to talk about ...

As technology encroaches on our daily lives more and more, it’s important to consider how we keep our data.  Who do we share information with?  Are we being too open?  Do we need to restrict access?  Does one company know too much about us? Now maybe I’m being paranoid.  But I just don’t like the idea of giving one company all of my data.  I believe in the old adage that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Because of this I have been trying to move my ...

Seeing as how it’s my job, I’m a big fan of social media and web sites.  They are a great way to build audiences, communicate directly with the customer, and create brand loyalty. They are also a great place to destroy all of the above. Enter MyPawPoints.com.  A website that offers rewards to customers based on how many bags of, you guessed it, kitty litter you purchase. Ever since I got married my use of kitty litter (for my cats, not me) has gone up.  Mostly because my ...

“How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world? It's something we'll monitor, but Americans are somewhat self-absorbed.” That was Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, explaining why Netflix can charge $7.99 in Canada while charging $8.99 in the US. I find this quote almost impossible to believe.  On one hand I can’t believe a CEO would have such arrogance. But then again we see that same arrogance displayed by many CEO’s (Bobby Kotick, Jack Tretton, Eric Schmidt).  And politicians regularly ...

If you’re on the internet you’ve had negative comments.  It’s part of the internet culture, for better or worse.  We looked at responding to negative comments in a previous post.  But are there benefits to negative comments?  Could your brand be improved by receiving negative comments? Surprisingly yes. Negative comments give you two benefits. 1.  Negative comments let you address legitimate problems.  Let’s face it we aren’t perfect.  We make mistakes.  Release defective products.  And don’t always have the best customer service.  If you bring your meaning to your work, ...

With all of the privacy changes to Facebook and the growing ease of finding people online, one of the growing areas of business is something called “online reputation management.”  The idea behind it is simple: you want to control how people see you online.  We probably all have embarrassing pictures of ourselves from some point in our lives (mine mostly involve the chicken pox).  Do we really want a future employer to see that? So companies are making a lot of money offering services to “...

Social Media is all about the interaction between expert and audience, company and customer, blogger and fan.  It’s that dynamic that sets it apart from writing a book or producing a TV show.  Yet when we open up the conversation we’re bound to hear from people who don’t agree with us. The internet is not always filled with calm, reasoned people.  If you’ve ever read comments on YouTube you know exactly what I’m talking about.  People take great pride in ripping apart things they haven’t spent any time thinking about.  We call them trolls. But there’s also a group of people who ...