Today I stumbled onto 43 Folders, a blog that focuses on finding the time & attention to do your best creative work. Turns out that prolific blogger Merlin Mann has been silent for over a month as he's pondering what creative direction to take next.

Boy, I can understand where he's coming from. Right now, I'm seriously pontificating my next book. 

I want to start writing in early 2009. I have lots of ideas, but rather than telling y...

So it’s official. Online surveys bore people. Two things confirmed this for me today. First, my colleague Helen was sent a particularly badly written online survey, and then I read of a report from Engage Research and Global Market Institute, which shows that people have become bored with the format of traditional online surveys. Helen’s experience was probably typical of many of those who responded. She received the questionnaire and started an...

The JF Guest Author Spot   Mark Tewart The word sell derives from the meaning “to serve.” Are you concentrating on the sale without serving first? Always think TLC – Think Like A Customer. Concentrate on creating such a selfless experience of giving that most customers will feel compelled to buy from you if your product or service [...]

Marshall Ganz is the person who designed organizational systems for the Barack Obama campaign. In listening to him on NPR’s On the Media about how they motivated and coached Obama volunteers to promote their candidate and recruit other volunteers, I was struck by the following passage: What we helped them understand is that the first thing [...]

Last month in my series on Twitter, I noted that according to one reporting site, "only a quarter million of (Twitter's 3 million registered users) post on any given day." As of today, Tweetrush notes that between 250,000 and 270,000 Twitterers are active in any given weekday. By that measure, Twitter is still very much a niche phenomenon given that (according to Nielsen) the active Internet audience is 372 million.

Popacular.com is hosting a T...

If your customers trust you, that’s good, right? Like, really good?

So suppose you wanted to ruin trust with your customers. What would you do to destroy trust?

• You might try lying to the client.
• You might try saying one thing and doing another.
• You could try keeping secrets from the customer.
• You could refuse to answer direct questions.
• You could actively prevent your customers from learning about cost-saving...

  “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” - Charles Darwin Whatever got you where you are today will not be sufficient to keep you there. A rapidly changing environment is the regular background against which organisations must develop. Change is continuous and will [...]

As with blogs that went before, the question of whether companies should use “corporate” Twitter accounts still polarises opinion. There are those who believe that “social” media should be exactly that, and others who think it is fine for companies to use any channel as a marketing channel.

This polarisation generally results in criticism rather than praise, as the former is much easier to do. The only corporate uses of Twitter that have been w...