Why You’re Always Broke I spent last weekend in Florida, jumping out of airplanes. When I had some downtime (no pun intended,) I was doing some quick homework as to my expenses last year. I came up with ten reasons we waste money, and how to prevent them. A ton of them I’d already been doing, but I thought of a few new ones, as well. Hope they help you, too. Why you’re always broke: 10) You’re broke because you mistakenly believe that coffee served by a person in a green apron tastes better than coffee you make yourself at home. $4 a day, $20 a week, $80 a month, $960 a year on the cup of coffee you get [...]

The following post represents my views, and doesn’t necessarily represent the views of the Education and Outreach Committee of the NASA Advisory Council, of which I’m proud to be a member. “The Future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted, it belongs to the brave.” -President Ronald Reagan On Friday, we say goodbye to a technological achievement beyond compare, a machine so far ahead of it’s time when it first arrived, and a conveyance that to this day, inspires awe in all who see it. We say goodbye to 30 years of solid work, of countless successes, and two dark and tragic failures. We draw the final curtain on a conveyance that carried more than 355 people from 16 nations from our planet into [...]

When I boarded my flight Wednesday morning from Denver to Houston to connect to a flight to Asheville for my speech on Thursday, I tweeted out a question. I said “I’ve got roughly five hours in the air today. How can I help you? You’ve got 45 minutes to respond.” And people did! So briefly, here’s what people asked, and my answers: @andreahrizk said that she needs exposure about a shortage of interactive talent in the advertising industry, and included a link: http://imediaconnection.com/content/28737.asp – I think she has a point – Small interactive ad shops can’t offer the same “possibility of instant riches” that tech startups, whether they be in a basement or in the Google offices, can. As such, [...]

Like everyone else, I was glued to Twitter Sunday night, watching the news of the death of America’s #1 outlaw. I took away a few points from the entire event, and want to see if I can apply them to our social media and marketing lives below. 1) Get your facts straight before you report. Before POTUS actually came out, one major network was busy saying “This is about Libya. Qaddafi is dead,” over and over. When they found out it was about OBL, they started changing their tune, while the text on the bottom of the screen still talked about Libya. They looked foolish. When your company has a crisis, one voice rules the day. Make sure you know [...]

My post the other day about how to help the paranoid boss understand social media was met with a lot of good comments and discussion. But I realized that I left out one very important boss scenario: The boss who says: Our Industry Doesn’t Have Any Reason to be in Social Media. Sometimes, we’re (meaning us, those in our industry) are so used to promoting new ways of communication, that we forget that there are industries outside of communications, marketing, advertising, and social media. And that’s where the above line comes from – bosses thinking “Oh, we have nothing to do with that, our audiences aren’t there.” And I’ve heard from several companies in the past few days who have [...]