(Cross-posted at Shankman.com and A Year to Ten Percent.) I’ve already gotten about 30 party invites, have had two hotels ask me if I need comped rooms, and been offered several dinners, rides, and the like for this year’s South by Southwest festival. And I’ve had to turn them all down, because this year, I’m not going. Say you’re not going to Southby (as the “cool kids” call it,) and you’re looked at like you just turned down a backrub from the next door neighbor on The Big Bang Theory. So I’m putting it out here, why I’m not attending the huge festival of South and West. 1) I’m busy. This is the simple reason. I’ve got two paid speaking [...]

I got an email from someone two days ago from the shankman.com contact page – and true to what I preach, I responded – Me – no one else. (Took me a day, but I did.) This person simply asked, “How do you cultivate the seemingly endless energy you have to constantly meet new people and grow your network like you say you do?” I thought about it for a while – And it bothered me – Because I couldn’t come up with an answer immediately – I don’t think I’m full of energy – Quite the opposite – I see myself as constantly tired. As much business travel as I do, always up early for training for this stupid [...]

Conference season is upon us! It’s been a fun, relaxing summer, but welcome back to hell! With more conferences than ever before from which to choose (don’t these guys know we’re supposedly in a recession?) here are eight easy tips to help navigate the ones you do choose to attend. 1) Networking starts LONG before you get there. The second you register, use the beauty of social media to let the world know, and find new people who are going as well. Ask them if there’s a hashtag, then use it. You want to have at least ten new people you plan to meet over the course of the conference before you go to the conference. The rest of the [...]

I am beyond thrilled to announce that HARO, my baby, what I started in November of 2007 as a FACEBOOK GROUP, with NO idea what it would eventually become, has been acquired by Vocus, Inc. It is a GREAT day! As you’ll see in the video below, NOTHING CHANGES. HARO will still be free. You’ll still get the most helpful media queries in the world, three times a day, right to your inbox. I’ll still be running HARO, and still writing the ads, and updating you with my little blurbs each day. But… Great things will now be able to happen. We’ll have a kick-ass infrastructure, which will allow us to grow HARO better than ever before. Different countries. More [...]

I woke up this morning, my first night home after a very successful South by Southwest, to a hungry cat at 5:30am. I was exhausted, and pushed her away. Turns out, she wasn’t so much hungry, as she was trying to inform me of a shitstorm brewing in the comments section of a well-written blog post, about how there were way too many douchebags at an otherwise excellent conference. She’s a very smart cat. The short story – A blog post was posted about someone at a party who yelled at a volunteer. It wasn’t me. However, under the influence of too much tequila, I posted a comment on Twitter inside the TechKaraoke party that was taken totally out of [...]