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It may be the greatest of all business cliches — you have to differentiate yourself.  I’ve said it myself more than once.  While it is certainly true… many businesses struggle with how to bring the idea to life.

And even when a business believes they have achieved that level of [...]

How many zombies are among your Facebook fans or Twitter followers?

New research conducted by DDB indicates that fans and followers “unlike” brands who are too blabby or too irrelevant. Yet the numbers of disaffected fans who take the time to unlike your brands are in the minority. For every “unliker,” there are five former fans [...]

Thanks to the Dashboard Spy reader who reminded me of this excellent white paper titled “Dashboard Design for Real-Time Situation Awareness” by Stephen Few, author of Information Dashboard Design.

You can download it here (direct pdf download):

Dashboard Design for Real Time Situation Awareness

Here is an excerpt:

Situation Awareness

Although not all situations require ongoing moment-to-moment awareness, [...]

Results multiply when lead nurturing strategies multiply. Successfully engaging prospects depends on a mix of tactics to maintain positive awareness of your offering until it’s time to buy. The resources and methodologies needed to address these requirements include a smart mix of three core processes:

Multi-touch: Frequency matters. From initial engagement to lead qualification [...]

Good public relations is a carefully planned, sustained marketing effort to establish your company identity, maintain credibility and promote communications between your company and its public. It means getting the word about your company to the media so that they, in turn, will keep your name and good deeds in front of their audience—your potential [...]

…is social media right for your business?

There are a lot of social media “experts” out there who will tell you that every single organization on the globe should be participating in social media.  They will point to the cool Facebook fan pages they’ve made or the funny videos their clients have on [...]

Yes, it’s that time of year – summer is just about over and the kids are going back to school. And it’s not just the kids, but also for us Dashboard Spies.

What do I mean? Well, Chandoo has reopened his Excel Dashboard School and VBA Classes.

Go here to check it out: Excel VBA [...]

There are 300,000 mobile apps that have been downloaded 10.9 billion times. The average smartphone user has 22 apps, the average feature phone user has downloaded 10 apps. iPhone fans lead the way with an average of 37 apps.

Every one of them raises our expectations about content, connectivity and functionality. But in spite of the [...]

Are you being asked to spend less on marketing, because your marketing budget has been slashed?

Despite the need to trim your marketing budget, you must maintain a dialog with your customers. It’s especially important during a sluggish economy, when your customers are also looking at ways to cut their costs.

To communicate with [...]

Along with the French, but unlike the current MDA Board, I love Jerry Lewis, not only because he’s an incredible comic but because he is the original social media marketer.

Consider these four important legacy lessons.

Create Own-able, Original Content. The schmaltz, the cheesiness, the kids in wheel chairs, the has-been performers singing long-forgotten big-band songs, [...]