Last January I had to make a really tough decision – keep people employed for a few more months and close the business or lay them off right then and save the business. Then (last year sucked), when we realized the business model was completely changing, I had to make another hard decision: Keep people who I really liked having around or let them go so we could hire experts in digital communication. Continue Reading »

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my friend Arik Hanson. He had an idea that he thought would help out-of-work PR professionals network with the jobs that are becoming more readily available at both agencies and companies.

The big idea:

On Friday, February 19, from 10 am – 2 pm CT, PR bloggers, agency leaders, and PR professionals from across the country will donate their time and talents to help fellow PR pros connect with employers as part of the first-ever “Help a PR Pro Out” day. Continue Reading »

Are you ready?

@PatrickReyes Patrick works at GM and is the furthest thing you would think when you think marketing and automaker. If he gets his way, he’ll change the way the auto industry communicates…for the better. On top of his demanding job, he blogs at Salt and Light, and quite consistently. AND, his New Year’s resolution was to commit to exercise. He’s on day 31 of P90X and loving it. He talks about his progress and it’s fun to watch. His only negative? He’s a Lions fan.

@dietcokeluvah You know how you meet people who are not scared ONE BIT to jump into a conversation, engage, and endear themselves to you? That’s my Diet Coke friend, who (for some reason), has an avatar of My Little Pony today. She has just started her blog, but I’m already intrigued. Note the Web sites/blogs she has listed…see a common theme? Continue Reading »

I have been really bad at my #FollowFriday lists since the holidays. But I’m back!

@DashalGroup Nick might very well be one of the funniest (is that a word) people I know. The things that come out of his mouth (or fingers) make you stop and think, “Where the heck did that come from?” He also is not shy, at all, at making fun of me, which I love. He makes fun of me and other people laugh. Trust me on this one, you want to follow him. He’s starting @crapthatsfunny and I guarantee you’ll think whatever he posts is FUNNY. He’ll be mad at me if I don’t at least tell you what he does for a living – advertising and Web design.

@JaimieField I don’t remember how Jaimie came into my life, but she came in with real force! Even though she’s a Yankees fan (we forgive her) and an attorney (but doesn’t practice, so we forgive her) she is always a bright light in my tweet stream at the end of each day (she’s much more disciplined than me – I check Twitter all day; she checks at the end of the day).  If you’re an attorney, Jaimie is a must have connection. As I take over the world, she’ll be there with me. Continue Reading »

Yesterday I was friended on Facebook by someone I don’t know. We have a lot of mutual friends, so the friend request makes sense, but I don’t like to let people on my personal Facebook page who I don’t know in real life.

This happens often, especially because of all of the speaking that I do, and I always thank the person for the invite and suggest, instead, they become fans of Arment Dietrich, where I spend a lot of time engaging with clients, prospects, potential candidates, and our employees. I know some people are put off by this because it sounds like I’m promoting the company. And, I guess I am. But it’s less to promote the company and more to engage with people I don’t know in a place that feels safe to me.

But for some reason, yesterday’s request is bothering me. I think it’s because his  response was, “thanks anyway”, which makes me believe I left a bad taste in his mouth.

If you know me well, you know I want to be liked by everyone. And you also know I have trouble saying no. So when I perceive I’ve hurt someone’s feelings or left a bad taste in their mouth, I wonder how I could have handled the situation differently. At the same time, I am (in my wise old age) finally learning I need to have some boundaries.

Right now, my boundaries are as follows:

* On my personal Facebook page, I have to know you in real life (which is why, Dave Van de Walle, I don’t have very many friends there).

* On the Arment Dietrich Facebook fan page, I will talk to anyone there, even if it’s negative. This is where we’re building our culture and building relationships with people we might like to work with in the future (as well as people we work with now).

* On Twitter, as long as you don’t look like a spammer, I will follow you back and I will get to know you. My friend Nancy Lyons always teases me because I will talk to anyone on Twitter. It’s true. I will. I love Twitter and the relationships I’m able to develop using that tool.

* On LinkedIn, I will accept your connection IF you tell me how we know one another. The “I’d like to add you to my personal network” invite doesn’t work for me, unless I truly do know you. I never click “I don’t know this user,” but I do often just hit “archive” instead of “accept.”

What are your boundaries? How would you have handled the friend request I mention above?

*Photo courtesy of GeekSugar

Before the holidays, we spent some time here talking about blogs – how to create them,  how to attract readers, and how to optimize your content.

One thing, however, we didn’t discuss is how to promote and publicize your blog posts, after they’ve been published, in order to attract readers who don’t yet know about you.

This is the process I follow every time I hit publish:

1. Go to Delicious and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

Save your blog post, with the original link (not a shortened link), as a bookmark. I have our Delicious page set up to automatically feed my FriendFeed and Twitter accounts after it’s been posted. To learn how to do that, Scott Hepburn has an easy-to-follow blog post on the topic here. He even goes so far as to suggest you do this with Google Reader. I don’t do that because I want to have read the content I tweet before I actually distribute it.

It takes a couple of hours for Delicious to feed to FriendFeed and Twitter, so I do this late at night (after 9 p.m.) in order to hit the people up, and on Twitter, around midnight.

2. Go to su.pr and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

I love this URL shortener because it:

* Adds your content to StumbleUpon (which helps with SEO AND attracting new readers);

* Gives you times of each day that your tribe retweets you most often on Twitter (so you know when to post);

* Shows you all of the retweets each post has received and who did the retweeting; and

* Gives you pretty accurate traffic information you can then overlay with your Google analytics.

I don’t, however, like to use the timed feature in su.pr because it tends to act wonky at least once a week and it sometimes “loses” your links. So I go there only to shorten the link so I can use it in other places.

3. Go to SocialOomph and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

I like using this service to time my tweets (I do one an hour from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. CST) Mondays through Thursdays (I don’t tweet news on Fridays because of #FollowFriday).

Based on what su.pr tells me, I schedule our blog post (using the su.pr shortened link) to tweet three times the following day. For instance, I know on Tuesdays, 9 a.m., noon, and 3 p.m., are the times I’m retweeted the most. So I set up our blog post to be tweeted at those times every Tuesday.

For every other tweet during the day, I set up news, articles, and blogs I read that support my thinking, but aren’t self-serving (i.e. not information coming from Arment Dietrich).

Keep in mind that you can not use the same copy for the multiple scheduled tweets. They must be different copy or Twitter will consider it spam.

So this is what my scheduled tweets looked like yesterday:

4. Go to Facebook and, using the original blog link (not the shortened one), I let our fans know what they can read about on the blog.

5. Go to LinkedIn and, again, using the original blog link, update my status to drive my connections to the post.

6. Answer all comments you get on your blog. I typically answer on the blog, but also send an email to the commenter thanking them. This not only makes people feel good, but sometimes creates an offline conversation that builds my relationship with that person.

Rinse and repeat each day. I know this sounds like a lot, but I timed it when I wrote this post. It took me eight minutes.

Are there things you do to publicize your blog posts that are not listed here?

Sometimes you have to hit me over the head with a 2 x 4 to get me to realize what I do every day A LOT of people would love to know. That’s what Robin Scott did when she direct messaged me about a comment I left on Julio Varela’s blog this afternoon (watch his vlog here - it’s about the importance of commenting on other’s blogs – and read the comments, too).

She said, “You read my mind. Saw your comment on organizing blogs. Just what I needed!”

Well, duh. I’ll bet other people would like to know, too, mostly because people say to me all the time, “How do you read so much in a given day?” I wish I could say that’s all I do every day. But it’s not. Following is how I find great material, stay energized with fresh ideas, and organize my feeds for time efficiency.

1. Subscribe to SmartBrief newsletters. They have about a zillion different topics and they send you one email a day with the best of the best. They use the headline and the first paragraph in the email. You can quickly scan the listing to see if there are any stories you want to click on and read more.

2. Set up Google alerts and Blogsearch (and/or Technorati) alerts on topics of interest to you. This is how you’ll find new bloggers, reporters, and columnists to read.

3. If you’re on Twitter, scan your stream daily to see if there are interesting headlines of stories you want to read.

4. After you find you keep going back to the same Web site, blog, news site, reporter, columnist, or blogger subscribe to their feeds. You can do this by clicking the “subscribe here” or “RSS feed” button.

I, personally, don’t like using an RSS reader (such as Google Reader). I subscribe to everything via email. I know, I know. You don’t want to fill up your inbox. Hang on and I’ll tell you how I manage that.

5. If you decide to use a reader, just create an account and then you can send all of the articles you like directly there. Be sure you open your reader daily, though. You can set it as your home page so when you open your Internet, it automatically comes up and you can scan to see if there is anything more you want to read.

6. If you decide to subscribe via email (like I do), create an offline folder in your email software called Blogs (or something equally creative). Then create subfolders for the titles of each of the blogs, Web sites, or news sites. Then create a rule so that, anytime new information is published, the email goes directly to the appropriate folder. You’ll have to get the email the first time in your inbox. Just create the rule at that time, click the “run this rule on emails in my inbox” button and it will automatically transfer everything to the folder.

7. Create an Instapaper account for those articles or blogs you want to read, but don’t have time right at the particular moment that you’ve opened it. When you have the story open, you can click the Instapaper icon you’ve added to your bookmark toolbar (it walks you through how to do this when you create your account) and it saves it for you. The handy thing is that, if you have an iPhone, you can access the stories via the app, too. Love it!

There are steps I take after these, if I want to share anything I’ve read with my networks. But that’s for another blog post.

I didn’t do all of this at once. It’s been a culmination of several months, trying to decide what works best for me.

What works for you?

It’s one of my favorite times of the week – #FollowFriday – because I can highlight a few Twitter friends for you to follow, meet, and engage with in the coming week.

@dougleavy Doug is the grand social media poopah for @westonemusic (he also manages that Twitter account so follow both). He’s a musician so it makes sense that he works for Westone. I keep asking @westonemusic to marry me and he’s playing hard to get. Have I mentioned they’re the best headphones on the market? Follow Doug, get to know him, but also ask him if his alter-ego will please marry me.

@robinwalker Robin, without fail, makes me laugh when she tweets me. Our relationship began when I said I loved East Bank Club (a country club-like fitness center in Chicago where Oprah and Obama both work out) and she asked me if I’d go there with her to audit a stretching class. That made me laugh pretty hard – who doesn’t love that kind of humor? Follow her. She’ll make you laugh. No pressure.

@CameronHerold Cameron owns a company called Back Pocket COO, which works with entrepreneurs (who have big dreams) to operationalize their businesses for better results. He, literally, is their back pocket COO. He was COO at 1800GOTJUNK when they were in hyper growth so he really knows what he’s doing. He’s Canadian (you know I love my Canadians), he’s ultra-smart, he’s down-to-earth, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s a good friend and very much worth the follow.

@justinthesouth I’m re-recommending my friends and Justin is in that group. He hates it when I say this, but he truly is one of the nicest people on the face of this earth. He’s genuinely kind and, no matter what kind of day he is having, he always takes time to ask how you are and if there is anything he can to make your day better. He has big vision for stopping human trafficking and it’s going to be fun to watch him realize his dream in the next few years.

@mebplanner Teresa was one of the first people I met on Twitter and it’s been a long time since I’ve recommended people follow her. She’s an event planner and a photographer. She was out of job for a bit earlier this year and I’ve not watched anyone who is unemployed be as positive and optimistic as she was. She’s worth a follow for her glass is half full attitude, as well as links to her amazing work (no pressure…post more!).

@jelenawoehr I met Jelena in real life early this year and then started following her on Twitter. She is, by far, one of the smartest people I know. She is wise beyond her years (follow her and then tell me your guess on how old you think she is – don’t cheat!) and has a phenomenal sense of humor. Engage with her – you won’t be sorry. She is F-U-N-N-Y!

I continue meeting really great people on Twitter. Following are a few new friends and few  old ones, as well.

@julito77 Julio is, by far, one of the best people in real life and on the social networks. He started V5, an arm of his family’s company, a few months ago and has already launched it into the big leagues. Watching his success is both exciting and fun. He’s a guy you want to see succeed because he’s so likeable. And, if you engage with him on Twitter, he will talk to you…no matter how busy he is or how many other people he’s talking to. Try it; it’s worth it.

@BMAMan I’ve known Blair for a few years in real life and introduced him to Twitter nearly a year ago. I always joke he should be my agent because, if he’s in a meeting I’m in, and I’m presenting, he knows how to take what I’ve said and tell people they’d be stupid not to hire Arment Dietrich…without saying the word stupid. It’s actually quite amazing to watch. He’s a Baby Boomer CEO who gets communication and how the Internet is changing how we do our jobs. He’s worth a follow…even though he tells really bad jokes.

@PattiKnight Patti is my lifeblood. Without her, none of what I do would be possible. Two years ago, my Vistage Chair told me it was time to hire myself an assistant. I couldn’t fathom a) what an assistant would do that I can’t do for myself and b) how I would pay her because she’s no billable. Now I don’t know how I lived without her. There isn’t anything she can’t, or won’t, do. Follow her…especially if you ever want access to me. She is your friend. And I think she even takes bribes.

@swapontherun What is Swap On the Run, you ask? Well, I asked Scott that very question and he told me he’s building a little business that allows runners to swap, trade, or exchange equipment with other runners. So then I asked about cyclists and he said it’s in the plan (yay!). Check out the Web site here and give Scott a follow.

@MimiMeredith Mimi might, very well, be one of the kindest people on earth…with a GREAT sense of humor. She wrote “Blooming Where You’re Planted” and she’s a speaker and newly minted Vistage member. She’s on a mission to help all of us have better work/life balance, and finding ways to enjoy what it is we do in our worlds. Check out The Goodness Grows here and give her a follow.

@AbLars I met Abby at a speaking engagement I had a couple of months ago. She was not shy about coming up to me, introducing herself, and telling me she follows me on Twitter. Since then, I’ve learned she is full of life, passion, and optimism. She works for Dale Carnegie and is pushing the organization to move toward more social engagement with their audiences. She’s worth a follow because she will put a smile on your face if you’re having a bad day.

@JaimieField My new friend Jaimie is quickly becoming one of my favorites. She’s a New York sports girl, through and through (but don’t hold that against her – if I can get past it, you can too). And she’s another friend who left the law world to coach attorneys still at it how to make rain. She is funny, she isn’t afraid to push some buttons, and you’ll really like following her.

Past #FollowFriday recommendations:

Nov. 6

Oct. 16

Oct. 2

Sept. 25

Sept. 4

August 28

August 21

August 7

July 24

July 17

July 10

July 3 (which is a culmination of the previous five weeks)

It’s #FollowFriday time! Here are seven new people to follow this week, along with past week’s at the end of the post.

@Robert_Saric One of the first things that drew me to Robert was his bio reads “future NY Times best selling author.” I love that – his goal is there for everyone to see, which means he’ll reach it! Take a gander through his Web site and you’ll see he has the PERFECT attitude for social networking. He joins my Canada contingent. I really think @MartinWaxman is right. I should receive honorary citizenship.

@pateast I met Pat on Twitter and IRL yesterday when I spoke to his Vistage group. He owns a company that does SEO and pay-per-click. If you want to learn how online marketing is done really well, check out Pat and Hannapin.

@ItStartsWithUs I don’t remember how I met Nate, but I do know I got to know him because he comments brilliantly on our blog, and he challenged me to read my first Stephen King novel. But, in return, he has to read Ayn Rand. Check out what he’s doing – he’s a big believer in paying it forward and being good people. He’s very inspirational and worth a follow.

@bneale Bryan is another Vistage member I met yesterday who has it together. He is partner at Caskey, Inc., a sales organization. He has created “The Advanced Selling” podcast for sales teams, which is very effective. If you’re in sales, you must check it out.

@RyanKnapp I initially connected with Ryan because he’s a cyclist! He’s been posting his stats for us to see and we’re trying to talk him into riding cross-country with us next year. He got married last Saturday so wish him a big congratulations!

@KaseyCrabtree I connected with Kasey because her dad is a Vistage Chair and she was looking for some input from members that she could feed him. Since then I’ve learned she is a social media whiz who wants to put her skills to work. Plus she’s a DJ so now you can say you know someone famous!

@pamelalbales I met Pam yesterday at the Vistage meeting, too. One of her first comments to me was that social media “isn’t instinctive.” But, by the time I got back to Chicago last night, she was not only on Twitter, she was connecting and engaging with people she follows. In, literally, less than three hours. Impressive! I’ve created yet one more addict.

Past #FollowFriday recommendations:

Oct. 2

Sept. 25

Sept. 4

August 28

August 21

August 7

July 24

July 17

July 10

July 3 (which is a culmination of the previous five weeks)

For an easy way to follow everyone here, plus those on earlier lists, you can copy and paste the Twitter handles into NinjaFollow.