From the category archives:

Professional

Enterprise content marketers are making a huge mistake with Facebook

04.22.2012

A survey of Inc. 500 companies shows the first decline in corporate blogging since 2007. Many are switching their content efforts to Facebook. Big mistake, as Janet Meiners Thaeler points out in the post linked above. I agree with everything she says. And here’s another way to think about it; Facebook is a valuable channel, [...]

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Your customers don’t believe you because you lie to them every day

04.17.2012

I recently got a robocall call from a home security company, offering me a free system so they could get a foothold in my neighborhood. I considered it for a moment, and then hung up, even though I want a home security system. Why? Because I assumed they were lying. Do they really mean free, [...]

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Are you ready to get simple?

04.16.2012

I don’t consider myself a particularly trendy person, but I do live in a funky little town on the edge of a college town. I walk all over the place for exercise, walk through campus a lot, and I keep my eyes open. I’m also spending a lot of time on Pinterest these days, planning [...]

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$1 billion for Instagram was a bargain

04.15.2012

There’s been a great deal of controversy about Facebook’s purchase of photo sharing site Instagram for $1 billion. As always, people are heralding it as a harbinger of a new social media bubble. How can a site like Instagram possibly be worth that much, and how can it add to Facebook’s share value? But that’s [...]

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What I want in a blogging platform

02.20.2012

I’ve had a self-hosted WordPress blog at dbthomas.com for several years, because I wanted to have control over my content for the long haul, and because, frankly, I thought as someone working in social media, it imparts at least a little bit of geek cred. These days I find myself using Facebook more than anything, [...]

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How to survive as a marketing or communications professional in 2012

12.26.2011

I’m a little frustrated right now. Over the last several years, quite a few people have asked me for advice about getting into social media. Some of them are good friends, and a lot of them are people with a professional communications or marketing background. My advice has been the same for the last several [...]

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Why you should read Steve Jobs’ bio

11.12.2011

I’m halfway through the new Steve Jobs biography and it’s really making me think. I never paid much attention to Jobs when he was alive, other than having a general sense of his brilliance and his mercurial, intense personality. The book is bringing me a new appreciation and I think it’s essential for anyone whose [...]

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Adding punctuation with Siri speech-to-text on the iPhone 4S

10.16.2011

I picked up my iPhone 4 yesterday and one of the coolest new features is the Siri personal assistant. A lot has been written about this already, but I discovered something cool about the speech to text feature last night that I thought I would share. Siri lets you compose Twitter updates, Facebook updates, notes, [...]

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A day in the life, via Twitter

10.14.2011

Last week, Jamie Sandford began the day with what I’ll call a “metatweet.” I responded. It took off. Here’s how our conversation evolved throughout the course of the day: @jsandford: <something about coffee> @davidbthomas: <something about Mondays> @jsandford: <inspirational way-too-much vim and vigor tackling-the-week tweet> @davidbthomas: <excessive use of motivational hashtags> @jsandford: <ending of day [...]

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Engage on your customers’ terms, not your own.

09.20.2011

I just got a call from my local Subaru dealer. “We notice it’s been four years since you bought your Subaru and we just wanted to check in to see how everything is going.” It doesn’t take much to translate that into, “It’s a slow sales month and we’re going back through our records and [...]

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