Grade A Entrepreneurs

I met Lynette Young at Guy Kawasaki’s party at SXSW earlier this year. She contributed to one of the chapters of Guy’s landmark book, What the Plus!: Google+ for the Rest of Us. No wonder, Lynette represents the elite of “female googlers,” with over 1.5M followers.
Lynette just released an excellent short book. Google+ for Small Businesses. Her [...]

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“What are words for if not to inspire the hearts, minds, and actions of our employees and customers?” Brian Solis asks this before listing a series of buzzwords that operate as “crutches for characterless engagement,” and are “indicative of how businesses see (or don’t see) employees and customers.” His advice is simple: Take a moment [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
What I like about long flights is that they enable me to read an entire book in one shot. This is how I read The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith from Vonavona ventures (an advisory and consulting practice), published earlier this year.
This excellent book focuses on how social media have [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
Reaching out to customers has been most companies’ motto for over twelve years, except that back then, “reaching out” mostly meant finding ways to bring them to your website with the maximum of bells and whistles through large email marketing campaigns. Great. It works, and works well, but it’s only one side [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
Books related to social media marketing keep coming out. The truth is that even if Internet and social media marketing aren’t new, the information needs for marketing managers are huge: the more they read, the faster they will get the immersion feel enabling them to move from a tactical use of social media [...]

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Marylene Delbourg-Delphis (Twitter: @mddelphis)
“Perhaps the biggest mistakes committed by businesses, personalities, and brands in social media occur when people jump into social networks blindly without establishing guidelines, a plan of action, a sense of what people are seeking and how and why they communicated, an understanding of where people are congregating, a definition of what they represent [...]

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Guest writer: Amita Paul
 “Most Fortune 100 Companies Don’t Get Twitter” – this statement referring a study published on Mashable intrigued me enough to write this article. This study was conducted by Weber Shandwick and presented a report on how well Fortune 100 companies use Twitter.  The stats led to conclude that a majority of these [...]

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Written by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust is for everybody, including folks who think that they have already achieved the status of being “trust agents,” and who believe they know all the ropes and tricks of the social media business. I say this from [...]

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Part 1: Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon
Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena
The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign… While analog and digital tribes appeared independently at the same period, they converged about ten years ago, and are now increasingly hard to dissociate. Even though the expansion of digital tribes does not change [...]

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For part 1: Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon
Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena… Godin rightfully reminds us that the creation of a tribe, and its goals, are independent from technology. Tribes didn’t appear yesterday and did not wait for the Internet era. Many of the examples of tribes selected by Godin can exist [...]

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