Short post cuz the video pretty much says it all and I can’t take any credit here.

If you want to read the original post and get your hands on many of the sources as well as the stats go here. If you want to see a presentation (different authors) with very similar statistics on slideshare go here.

Grab some popcorn cuz its a few minutes but its good. Continue Reading…

As Oprah pulled up at the Twitter table last week it seemed like the party was over. There are no shortage of people who declared that the reason to use Twitter was dead now that it was being taken over by celebrities like Aston Kutcher (@aplusk) and the aforementioned Ms. Winfrey.

I guess that is one way you could view the happenings, yet I’m going to ask you take a look at a different group of people (all of whom are celebrities) and I think you will get the sense that while Oprah is undoubtedly like your parents (and why not follow my Dad – @actonroad) chaperoning and then deciding to dance at your prom, if you take the time to follow some of the great athletes that have embraced Twitter you’ll get a totally different view.

I am going to start by saying that I do not really think it’s fair to put Shaq or Lance Armstrong in the same column as Oprah when it comes to their “cool” factor, but I think it is essentially fair if we are just trying to compare celebr-twit to celebri-twit on my invented “this person is autograph worthy” scale. Continue Reading…

As if he were not an inspiring enough speaker alone, at the end of his first speech to Congress Tuesday night Barack Obama did something that every CEO should take note of – he took the time to not only shake the hands of named Congressmen and women, but seemingly as important to him he stopped shook hands with and even engaged in brief conversation with the “pages” who had attended.

This is the leader of the free world and nobody had to remind him that those young pages were a huge part of the movement which elected him. Nobody had to explain to him what a thrill it would be to be 20something and have the President shake your hand and ask what you thought of his speech. Which is why it was both natural and so very classy when Obama took the time to seek out the pages. Continue Reading…

Changing the culture of any business is a difficult task but try setting a policy aimed at changing the culture of your business when your employees are for the most part twenty-somethings each of whom is making millions of dollars a year in salary alone.  That was the task that faced the National Basketball Association three years ago when commissioner David Stern first implemented a NBA Player Dress Code.

Despite what you think of the NBA, the league was at a cross-roads after the 2004-2005 season.  It was a league that had not had Michael Jordan on the marquee for years, did not have a superstar to replace him with (even Kobe Bryant had suffered public indiscretions) and to top it off the Indian Pacers and Detroit Pistons were involved in a brawl which started on the basketball court but ended up in the stands. That incident caused nine players to be suspended without pay for a total of 146 games (which led to $10 million in salary being lost by the players), five players were charged with assault, and all five were eventually sentenced to a year on probation and community service. Five fans were also legally charged, and one fan received a lifetime ban from attending Pistons games.

For a business that was trying to attract large corporate sponsorships, television deals and have individual arenas sell off naming rights the image of NBA players as thugs did not exactly gel. Continue Reading…

As I get more and more involved in social media and specifically work to launch this site there are lots of lessons along the way. One that recently came to my attention was the fact that people who take the few minutes it requires to set up their Twitter profile page (see mine here) are doing themselves a huge service whether they realize it or not.

I am not sure how everyone else uses Twitter and whether they take the time to head to people’s profile page but I can tell you I certainly do. I save up my Twitter follow notifications in my in-box and every couple of days I make a point of going to the the profile page of those people who I have recently started following or who started following me. Twitter allows you to personalize your profile to a certain extent by filling out a brief biography, listing a site that you blog on or otherwise etc. However if you do not take advantage of the rest of the landscape offered to you, I would submit that you are missing out on a great opportunity to both personalize your existence on Twitter and more importantly market whatever site, life philosophy or even charity you wish from your profile background picture.

I generally don’t love asking people to come to my site via Twitter (although it is sometimes necessary) but I do believe that when I post something of value or when someone else is kind enough to suggest people follow me, my profile page is my platform (litterally) for letting them know the quick hits of information that I wish to promote at that day in time.

As you can see on my profile I have the three most important pieces of information (my email and two blog sites) I wish to get across easily visible and more importantly easily revisable if I decide I want to promote something else.

The process took me ten minutes. I picked a royalty free photo from istockphoto, edited the sign in Pixelmator and uploaded it to Twitter. Now I have a personalized space, people easily know where to find me and more importantly my 2 blogs are promoted to everyone who visits my profile page. I would strongly suggest you do the same.