In this video I interview Carri Bugbee, founder of Big Deal PR, whose story is shared in the book Social Media Case Studies, Stories and Perspectives. Carri is better known for her role tweeting as Peggy Olson, a fictional character on  AMC's Mad Men. She shares the story behind her fan fiction role and the [...]

Read More: Fan Fiction and Social Media: Lessons From the Trenches

This guest post is by Chris The Traffic Blogger. My hands were shaking like crazy and I had to focus very hard on entering my bank account information correctly. Just minutes prior a buyer had been approved for my website on Flippa (see the actual auction page here), and I had to somehow manage to [...]

Read More: 6 Lessons I Learned Selling a $50,000 Website

Alright. It's time to have a little chat, particularly if you're in the PR profession. If you read Gin and Topics last week (or follow the industry news), you'll know a PR "professional" (I use that term loosely, which is why it's in quotes) called Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess aka The Most Hilarious Blogger [...]

Read More: Nine Communication Lessons from Hitting Reply All

This guest post is by Jonathan Thomas of Anglotopia.net. A common way for a blog to build its newsletter and traffic base is to hold a contest. My blog, Anglotopia, has been around for over four years now and we've had various successes and failures with contests. Eventually we basically just stopped having them, as [...]

Read More: 9 Lessons I Learned from Running a Sweepstakes

Tweet This is a guestpost by Eugene Farber from Reality Burst. Few tools, platforms or communities have gotten as much coverage (and sometimes criticism) in the blogosphere of late as Triberr has. The platform/community has grown rapidly. And when you get so many people on each side of the fence, you know you're doing something right. So [...]

Read More: 9 Marketing Lessons From Triberr

Tweet This is a guestpost by Eugene Farber from Reality Burst. Few tools, platforms or communities have gotten as much coverage (and sometimes criticism) in the blogosphere of late as Triberr has. The platform/community has grown rapidly. And when you get so many people on each side of the fence, you know you're doing something right. So [...]

Read More: 9 Marketing Lessons From Triberr

I first learned about the KISS acronym on the baseball field in junior high school. Whether “Keep it Simple, Stupid” or “Keep It Short And Simple” the most important word there was always simple. This was important on the baseball field because swinging a bat required smooth intuition rather than disjointed steps. Today, when I look at brands’ [...]

Read More: 8 Simple Social Media Lessons From Pro Sports

Today's guest post is written by Jelena Woehr. Part cat-herder, part social butterfly, part psychotherapist, and part janitor, the online community manager has a unique and rapidly evolving job. How can a person navigate the choppy, uncharted waters of online community management without losing her cool? Moderator Maria Niles, along with panelists Eden Kennedy, Elisa [...]

Read More: Three Lessons On Staying Sane As a Community Manager

This guest post is by Jeff Goins of Goins, Writer Six months ago, I was frustrated with my blog. I felt stuck and stymied. I had written on it for nearly five years and built a small, but steady, stream of traffic. But there was just one problem: it wasn't growing. And I was tired [...]

Read More: 7 Lessons I Learned by Starting Over with Blogging

Let's see. I've already talked about religion here, when I talked about how missions prepare Mormon men and women for leadership positions. So why not talk politics, too? Actually, I've been trying to find both communication and leadership lessons in what's happening in Washington. Because I'm so disgusted by it all, it's hard to separate [...]

Read More: Leadership Lessons In Washington

This guest post is by Annabel Candy of Successful Blogging. The Dalai Lama recently came to visit me on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Well, not me specifically but the thousands of people who drove miles, piled into buses, and waited under bright skies to hear him speak. It wasn't what I expected. I joined [...]

Read More: 10 Blogging Lessons from the Dalai Lama

This is a guest post by Tristan Handy, Director of Marketing at Argyle Social. Argyle is a leading social media marketing dashboard for business. My company, Argyle Social, was invited to participate in the Promoted Tweets beta as of January 24, 2011. For the past five months, we’ve used the channel fairly actively. Some campaigns [...]

Read More: 3 Lessons For Better Promoted Tweets Campaigns

When I was a kid, I remember my dad coming home from work and telling my mom he'd had to fire someone. I very vividly remember the image it conjured in my head. MY dad had set some poor man on fire! What about his family? What about MY family? Was my dad going to [...]

Read More: Communication Lessons from News of the World