The more you use social media, the more likely you will come across trolling behavior. It’s no big deal to just block a troll if your social media usage is casual. For those who use social media for commercial choices — i.e. selling a book, raising funds for a non-profit, or activism — examining troll behavior and how to best manage that behavior is a must for maintaining a digital profile. Trolls come to online profiles, but you can keep them away. Here are a few ideas of how trolling interaction should be kept in check.

Trolling by definition is…

Seems like everywhere you look, someone wants to be a thought leader on some subject. Speaking out is meant to give an advantage in leadership and drawing attention to what you have to say. But with so much social media proving exposure to so many insights, it is really important to know what and when to contribute to a public conversation. Understanding the differences makes the difference in identifying meaningful, inspiring thought leadership.

Thought leaders are assumed to be people with interesting opinions. While that is true, it runs a bit deeper than that. Thought leaders are people with informed…

If you are launching a digital ad to sell your book, webinar, or product, you will dabble with metrics that just show how many visits are occurring on your website. Digital ads have made marketing costs more affordable for small businesses, non-profits, and solopreneurs to advertise a product or service within a certain budget.

Most people look at the cost per click metric — if they look at metrics at all — and decide they have useful information to determine if they should still be advertising more or stop spending.

What people should look at are two metrics that most…

There are many technology platforms that business leaders and small team members see these days. IDEs and platforms have expanded their services beyond specific code. Yet team members may not know how to best contribute to the technical conversations online, be it with a developer or, these days, a data scientist. One tool that was just introduced, GitHub Discussions, may be the most helpful in gathering a development team with various skillsets on the same dialog to support a project involving a programming language.

What Is GitHub Discussions

GitHub Discussions is a platform for open transparency conversations that are not necessarily linked to a…

If you deal with analytics or marketing you will likely run into the term KPI, which stands for Key Performance Indicator. But what performance should be “indicated” in your dashboard? There are a lot of ways to approach selecting a KPI, but there are a few concepts that should be kept in mind no matter how the KPI is chosen.

Let’s start with the basics. KPIs are metrics linked directly to business growth.

There are many metrics that can seem useful as a KPI at the start of a campaign, such as follower growth on a social media platform. …

Let me paint a common business scenario, one which you will run into if you have not already.

You sit down with your laptop, fire up your email, and there, among your many, many, many unsolicited emails is one from an SEO company with who you have never done any business before. The email may read something like the following:

Hope you are doing well.

A quick analysis reveals your website having different technical glitches, where natural traffic is very low. Well, this is not the only reason for your website performance, because this list prolongs.

What we see from…

For a relationship to survive, it’s important to understand what the drivers are. For over 12 years I worked with small business owners and startup entrepreneurs who managed different kinds of relationships. I can tell you a lot of pressure occurs that likely would not existed had the business not existed. So like any relationship, it is important to learn what drives those challenges and what can be done.

When Love Gets Mixed Up

The reason relationships can get complicated when entrepreneurship is a factor stems from having to code-switch between casual times and the formal urgency of a “get-it-done” environment. Couples can find time…

Marketers are always looking at ways to get their products and services noticed. Newsjacking, when used smartly, is one of the best ways a product or service can create a buzz for itself.

Newsjacking is the art and science of embedding a product or service into a well-known public event. It is adding thoughts to events and issues. While events have been curtailed from the pandemic mandates, marketers have been turning to newsjacking as attention grabbers for large online community gathering or following a social media platform.

Newsjacking is derived from an agile marketing strategy. In agile marketing, brand managers…