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The other day I was conducting an educational workshop for folks interested in becoming Duct Tape Marketing Coaches. At one point I talked about presenting workshops as the primary way that coaches acquired customers and that it was an essential success factor for prospective coaches to consider. Read More

One of the most common reason stated by small businesses for not embracing social networking is that they can't measure or, worse yet, don't believe there is any solid return on the investment of participation. I get emails almost daily from frustrated marketers who want to dive more fully into social networking, but can't convince the boss that i Read More

Let me start by giving you some back story to this post. I read and pointed out on twitter an article from Fast Company - here's the tweet - @ducttape: Are You Building a Consumer-Facing Company? http://su.pr/2XxE7B the customer vs culture debate rages on. The gist of the article is that sometimes you have to bend to make sure the customer is ulti Read More

One of the major push backs I get surrounding twitter use for business involves the idea of ROI. It's a genuine concern and something that can feel very hard to measure for most businesses. It's rare when someone can effectively attract followers and blatantly sell something to that at the same time. In most social media settings it just doesn't w Read More

I've written often that one of the ways to create goodwill, positive buzz and happy customers is to exceed expectations. Responding proactively to problems offers, in my opinion, one of the easiest ways to exceed expectations available. Problems happen, that's a fact, and you can choose to respond to customer challenges, problems, let downs, scre Read More

I like to use to use images to help illustrate the theme or point of a blog post. It's a proven “best practice” in blogging and I highly recommend that every blogger do it. One trick for easily finding and properly using images in your blog posts is to search the creative commons licensed photos on the photo sharing site Flickr. Read More

I've added a weekend post routine that I hope you enjoy. Each weekend I write a post that features 3-4 things I read during the week that I found interesting. Generally speaking it won't involve much analysis and may range widely in topic. (Flickr image included here is also fav image of the week) Read More

There is a well-worn truth that goes something like - if you want to learn something teach it. I think this certainly applies to many aspects of business. If you want to learn something at a much deeper level then write about it, speak about it, and create and conduct workshops and trainings on the subject. You can and should be doing all of these Read More

So, what I'm wondering is this - What fundamental marketing “drills” should you, and every one in the organization be doing every single day to become marketing MVPs? (or at least get off the bench) Read More

One of the big questions that small businesses wrestle with right now is not whether they should participate in social media, but how to do it ways that make sense, show some return, and don't drive them crazy. Read More