- May 31, 2018 -

Gary Vaynerchuk. You're either a fan or you're not.

The guy who as a wine critic grew his family’s wine business from $3 million to $60 million...

I could hang with him.

The guy who built his personal brand by being the loudest, crudest voice in the room...

I've been known to drop some 4-letter words so no judgement on that.

But shock value has a short life span.

The guy who takes digital marketing to a level of hyper frenetic posting, tweeting, vlogging blah blah blah...

I'd freaking pull the rest of my hair out!

Gary Vee is a really smart dude - [...]

It's not often that an order confirmation email catches my attention - beyond making sure that the amount they charged to my credit card is correct.

I mean, what can you possibly do to make transactional emails anything other than sufficiently boring?

So when I found myself going back and re-reading what is normally a run-of-the-mill order confirmation email, I wanted to yell "Hallelujah! Someone actually gets what great marketing is all about!"

Moosejaw Mountaineering, whose Facebook tagline is "The Most Fun Outdoor Retailer on the Planet," knows how to put the fun back in marketing.

How about this for a company overview posted [...]

I've always had a love/hate affair with social media.

If you don't have a business Facebook and Twitter account, you're way behind the times.

I totally get that.

But because I'm an analytical guy, I just can't wrap my head around how I'm supposed to actually make money by Tweeting, Liking, Pinning, and Posting.

Every B2B business I've asked "Are you making serious money with social media?" starts to squirm a little and stammers something like...

"We've got over 12,000 Likes, and we use some really cool plugins that automatically Tweet three times a day." Or...

"The social media experts say it's all about the conversation [...]

Bobby Wilder, the head football coach at Old Dominion University tells his recruits: "If you're in love with Twitter, go someplace else."

He has a strict ban; if you are on the team, you are off social media - period - for the years you attend the school.

The story goes that as he began his freshman classes, one lineman tweeted: "Signing off. See you in about 5 years."

If you’ve read my blog posts for any length of time, you know that I am not a raving fan of social media.

And if every business owner spent as much time working on their [...]