My new integrated blog / site went live today. The first thing you'll notice is the lack of clutter. The talented folks at Viget convinced me that less is more.

So... no endless stack of widgets in the right-hand column of my blog. No "Digg this" or "Technorati" icons under each blog entry. We thought about this long and hard and I'm glad we did it this way. Note that there are icons for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and del.icio.us in the footer of each page.

It's been a…

I've known David Meerman Scott for several years. We've presented together at a conference. He cheered me on when The Corporate Blogging Book was published in 2006. I watched in awe when his New Rules of Marketing & PR was published a year ago in June 2007 and rocketed to best-selling PR book on Amazon.

Turns out New Rules is David's third book and he has a fourth coming out if you count the just released Tuned In, of which he is a co-author. What happened to his first two books? Why has New Rules…

I wake to dense fog cocooning our little house. All is not quiet, however. I can hear a fog horn punctuating the distance. A gull caws. Someone is hammering. A car goes by.

Our cottage is not as remote as I'd like (it's on the edge of town) but it's ours, all ours. And a place to think and read and write.

My friend Andy Sernovitz had the clever idea of offering a one-day "crash course" in WOM (aka word-of-mouth marketing) in his home town of Chicago. The first one is coming up July 30, 2008. More info and other dates here.

Andy is the author of Word of Mouth Marketing and was founder of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association). He's a great speaker and I expect this will be a fun as well as substantive event. He calls it "an active,…

Here's a list in no particular order of the new (or recent) business books I've got lined up on my shelf for summer reading. I won't read most of these cover to cover. I'll skim, look for useful tidbits, consult the index, etc. I bet you read most business books the same way.

Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (comprehensive and spot on: what corporations need to know to understand and make use of social media)

Made to Stick…

One of the most animated discussions about social media I've seen is going on over at Alan Weiss's Contrarian Consulting blog.

His blog post titled Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Chance has sparked, as of this writing, 60 comments, many of them refuting Weiss's contention that social media (including blogs and Twitter) are a waste of time for consultants promoting professional services to corporate clients.

He also contends that "Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand... a blog follows a brand,…