“Welcome to Hollywood! Everybody has a dream! What’s your dream? What’s your dream? Hey mister – What’s your dream?” Opening line to Pretty Woman, for those who don’t remember – A spectacular movie. (See the director’s cut, where Richard’s limo driver pulls a gun on Vivian’s pimp. Seriously.) But seriously – What is your dream? We all used to have one as children, right? Everyone had a dream. Fireman, rock star, Elephant herder… Doesn’t matter? When did you become sidetracked from your dream? Was it when you got that first job that led to the second job that eventually led to where you are now? Was it when you started making serious money? Was it the family? They became more [...]

Remember my post back in August about how it’s time to say goodbye to free WI-Fi in coffeehouses, in airports, etc? I have never been more sure of something in my life – Today, I’ll prove it. I’m on the 6:20am Amtrak from NYC to Boston right now. For a brief moment, I switched off my Sprint EVO 4G, and am using Amtrak’s free WiFi to prove a point. I also installed a little Add-on to Firefox (I usually use Chrome, I switched to Firefox for this experiment,) called Firesheep. If you haven’t heard of Firesheep, prepare to be really, really frightened. I’m not a true tech geek, so please forgive me if I don’t totally speak Geek. Essentially, FireSheep [...]

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 [...]

I spent a day last week speaking to a Fortune 100 company about the best ways to integrate social media into their marketing plans, and how best to use social media to help their marketing to continue to generate revenue. The majority of questions they asked me afterward fell into the following categories: 1) So how do we get more followers? 2) So how do we get more likes? 3) Should we hold a contest to get more followers/likes? 4) How do we get our followers/likes to spread the word about us? These are smart people. These people are the marketing force behind a company that interacts with millions of people through multiple brands every day. These people aren’t stupid [...]

Running HARO for the past three years, I’ve seen, hands down, the best ways to get your story placed, front page, EVERY TIME. Assuming you want ALL THAT COVERAGE, as your boss has told you that you do, these are, without question, the top five ways to get it. Make sure you follow EVERY single rule here, and you’ll be well on your way to getting tons and tons of coverage! 1) Make sure to pitch completely and totally off-topic, with absolutely no regard to what the journalist covers. Hey, times are tight, right? They should be LOVING you for pitching them at all! They cover finance? Make sure to pitch them on a home entertainment system for 8-15 year [...]