I got an email this morning that even floored me, the most cynical person in the world. It came from a PR person who was pitching me a new product – A shirt. Yes, a shirt. Nothing special about the shirt, it was simply a new style from a new designer. But here’s what gets me: The subject line of the email was: “Hi! Can I borrow your audience?” (Insert blogging-car-skidding-to-a-halt sound here…) Can you borrow my… Hold up… WHAT? Can you “BORROW MY AUDIENCE?” Are you serious? OK. Not even taking into account the fact that my audience… IS AN AUDIENCE, and not, say, A SPATULA, no, you can’t “borrow my audience.” Let’s understand something – My audience is [...]

It’s SO the little things. In a future blog post, I’ll be talking about the wonderful experience that is GroundLink. But as I was taking a GrounLink car to JFK this morning, it got me thinking about why I loved them so much – And I realized that yet again, it’s the little things. Here’s a list of eight things you can do RIGHT NOW, for little or no cost, that will improve your customer service, get your customers happier than they’ve ever been, and get them talking about you to all of their friends! 8) Know your audience. This is one of the easiest, yet most forgotten things in customer service. Imagine being able to talk to your audience [...]

In general, “the rules” fall into two categories. “For our safety,” or “for gain.” By “for gain,” I mean for a company’s gain – i.e., “We can’t give out more than one sample because we’ll lose money.” In general, the rules make sense. Except for the TSA. Their rules never make sense. But – Part of succeeding in business has to involve knowing when the bend, or even break the rules. There will never be a rule that can be designed for every single situation without fail. Every situation is different, and anyone in charge of enforcing the rules needs to understand that. No business will thrive (or even survive) if they don’t know when to bend or break a [...]

So in 2 days, this will happen:     That will be almost 16 hours of uninterrupted writing. Blog posts, my new book (due out in January, being published by Palgrave/MacMillan), emails for my newsletter… Heck, perhaps even a note to my future child (not that there’s anything in the works yet, calm down, mom…) But there will be writing. It seems that planes are the only place lately where I can write uninterrupted, without the real world, or the Internet, or my mobile phone, or my cat distracting me. (Squirrel!) Planes are my last bastion of creativity. I’ve got a handful of new blog posts to write, including… A true story of how a six year relationship with a [...]

A bit over a month ago, I was contacted by Facebook, asking if I’d like to “merge” my “fan” page (I’m STILL not comfortable calling it that) with my “personal” page on Facebook, and turn my “fans” into “subscribers.” Facebook’s logic there was that I’d only have to post all my content in one place, and could determine which content was “public,” (i.e., subscribers, the world, etc.,) and which I kept only for my “friends.” I volunteered to give it a shot, even after being told there was no turning back – i.e., my “Fan page” would disappear, and I couldn’t bring it back. After asking a ton of questions (and to Facebook’s credit, the person who reached out to [...]