Today’s communications exercise is a simple one: When you’re done reading this blog, I’d like you to do the following: Log into Facebook. On the lefthand navigation pane, click on “Friends.” Scroll through your friends list, and find six people with whom you haven’t spoken in at least six months. Make a choice: Unfriend them, or write on their wall. If you choose to unfriend them, know you’re doing so because if they’re in your network, you should be talking to them on a regular basis, fostering communication. It’s the original “networking.” It’s not about going to a networking party or the like. You should be cultivating everyone in your network at the least, several times a year. And remember [...]

Today FB makes the new profiles mandatory – You know, the ones that show the last five tagged photos of you right up top? Here’s hoping they’re five good photos of you. If they’re not, here’s how to make sure tagging doesn’t destroy your brand, ort just get you in trouble in general.

Have you seen something like this floating through your social media data stream recently? “Who wants to sponsor me to go to Overrated Conference 2011?” “I need a sponsor for my blog. Anyone?” “Who wants to send me to ABC for the WXY meetup?” Just look around. They’re everywhere. Seems that everyone with any social media presence, no matter now small, has glommed onto the “Sponsor me!” bandwagon. Unfortunately, 99.9% of those requests won’t ever get looked at, let alone acted on. Why? It’s simple, really. You want to be sponsored? You better damn well be sponsorable. What does that mean? What do you mean “I’d better be sponsorable? That’s not even a real word, Peter!” It’s a real word, [...]

One of the top five pieces of advice I ever got came from Lou Lamoriello, General Manager of the New Jersey Devils. I’d spent a year consulting for them, helping them to get into the interactive/online world back in the mid-90′s, after I left AOL. I’d been working all night to get the website up and running for our grand launch, and it was easier to sleep on the office couch then go home. But I hadn’t yet learned the lesson of taking off my suit before falling asleep, so when I woke up, even after washing my face and shaking out my jacket, I looked like I’d been run over by a truck. Of course, Lou picked that day [...]

One of my biggest problems is figuring out how much to charge, whether it be for speaking, consulting, or any of my services. I suspect a lot of us have that problem. We don’t want to overcharge, lest we don’t get the client/gig/project, but then, we don’t want to undercharge, hating ourselves while we’re doing it, knowing that the client would have easily paid more. I used to err on the side of undercharging, and I hated myself for it. I still do, sometimes. It’s frustrating. I’ve seen it happen out of business situations, as well – Paying six dollars for that trinket in Thailand, knowing that I probably could have negotiated my way down to four. It’s really a [...]