All we need is yet another acronym in our bowl of search engine marketing alphabet soup that already includes ROI, ROAS, CT, SEO. But there is one more worth mentioning, one you should be aware of and avoid at all costs: Ranking Obsession Syndrome, or ROS. You don’t have to search hard to find someone who’s obsessed with whether their company’s search engine rankings has moved from position...

Let’s imagine you learned of a mechanic who could double your gas mileage. You could take your car in and, after paying for a few modifications (which are legal, moral, and ethical), your gas mileage would be forever doubled. You would get to enjoy the savings and efficiency for as long as you own your car. Would you do it? While I know of no such mileage-doubling opportunity, I am aware of a sales-doubling...

This figure, which sounds authenticated and accurate, blows my mind: Only 11.8% of the Fortune 500 have an active blog.  Wow.  It’s 2009 and we haven’t time-traveled back to 1977 and joined the Dharma Initiative in Lost, right!??  That blog statistic, which I saw on John Cass’ blog makes me think that the other 88.2% of the Fortune 500 are still stranded in 1977.  Even with Barbara Rozgoniyi’s...

In the spirit of not continuing to waste time, money, and trees, I propose agencies and consultants adopt the immediate use of The Happy Face Report as the primary way to periodically communicate your progress on projects and results from campaigns. The idea for The Happy Face Report came to me in the form of a tirade that a prospect of mine was having one day.  “I’m so sick of reams of meaningless data...

For 10 years I’ve watched hundreds of companies and their various agencies and consultants go through “branding exercises”, “repositioning sessions”, “corporate facelifts”. Everybody thinks they can do it, precious few probably know how to really do it effectively. Every company gets to that point (sometimes several times) where they are compelled to spend lots of...

Imagine the following scenario…a man hires a personal fitness trainer because he has heard this trainer gets results. So the man and his trainer work tirelessly several hours a week. The trainer advises, the man diligently follows instructions, and so on and so forth. After several weeks the man comes into the gym dejected and frustrated, the trainer asks “what’s wrong?” The trainer...

I was reading through a daily devotional from The Purpose Driven Life where the author Jon Walker says “sometimes peacemakers are like the dentist C.S. Lewis speaks about in Mere Christianity. You go to the dentist because you have pain. But the dentist knows he must get to the root of the pain or the tooth will just keep causing problems.” As I digested those words I couldn’t help but to...