Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

For my penultimate post this year, I’ve been inspired by something Chris Brogan published yesterday on his blog about The Visible Media Maker. It’s a great post about being a personality while sharing stories.

One of my main goals for 2010 with Online Business Adviser is to make it more personal. When I say personal, I’m talking about injecting not only the blog, but also my social footprint with more information that is specific to me as a person in an effort to start more conversations.

In looking to achieve the goal, I’ve outlined 7 things that I believe are beneficial to any online business owner who wants to be more personal and build their brand. Some of these I have been doing all along, and some I am yet to do, but all are activities that should be a sooner rather than later project.  Read more...

I think it’s true for everyone that no matter where you have worked, you will come across people within an organisation who are just really, really good at what they do. Certainly for me, having worked across a number of different media companies, I have found people in all sorts of departments (not just mine) who know their stuff inside out and astonish me with their knowledge.

I consider these people as my Fantasy Business Team – the people that if I had was to go into business for myself and had the scale, I would want to recruit and have work with me, because they each bring something special to the table. It’s the kind of team that you think you could accomplish anything with.  Read more...

Every Saturday morning I take my son to his swimming lessons, which is truly one of the highlights of my week. My wife has deemed these weekend classes “dad soup”, because it seems this is the day when all the fathers are around to jump in the pool. Last weekend, I bumped into an old colleague who I had not seen in several years. We were Facebook “friends”, but in typical fashion, never really interacted much aside from the casual status “thumbs up”.

It was clear from the way the conversation went that he had been following what I was doing through my activity on Facebook. This gave us new things to talk about, particularly given I had done some work in his area of speciality, and it also led to the discussion of some potential contract work.

This is a great example of the intersection of social and real world networking, and the tremendous value of the latter.  Read more...

I’ve had some great feedback regarding my last post of 27 people who I derive value from on Twitter. Some of you left comments on the blog and I received a number of emails as well, and I want to thank all of you for your contribution to the conversation.

One of the themes that came up several times was around innovation, and why I didn’t single out anyone in my list as specifically innovative. I think the important thing to remember here is that the intention of the post was to list people that I derive the most value from. Certainly the list wasn’t exhaustive – there are a great many people that I get a lot from, but these people demonstrate consistent value.  Read more...

While there are some on Twitter who place value on the number of people they have following them, or that they follow, for me Twitter is about extracting the maximum value from a carefully selected group of selected people. Let’s face it, who has the time to trawl through tens of thousands of tweets to find something of interest?

I’m a big believer in getting the most out of your feed and rather than post multiple tweets about who you should follow on “Follow Friday”, I wanted to take the time to list them all and give a snapshot of who they are. When I was looking at this post, I thought of making it “50 people you should follow”. However, in the interests of reading time, and to make it just a little different, I have decided to make it 27 people you should follow. Obviously each niche in the online world will have their own rockstar tweeters, but as far as online business and marketing goes, these are the people whose tweets I derive the most value from (in no particular order).  Read more...