Like marketers, comedians spend their days carefully crafting messages for maximum impact. They tell stories. They build analogies of great length to make a point. They gauge reactions from their audience and adjust if needed.
The line between the two professions is blurry indeed, and we shouldn’t be surprised that comics like Jimmy Carr and Tim Sidell (aka @badbanana) had prior careers in marketing and advertising. They likely learned a lot from us! But now it’s our turn. Here are three important principles to bolster your social media strategy, extracted from the tips of the stand up trade.
1. Engage Your Hecklers
Hecklers make stand-up comedy a full contact sport. In smaller clubs, where patrons set their drink on the edge of the stage, back and forth with audience members is almost always part of the act.  And it doesn’t go away on bigger stages, either. I saw Jerry Seinfeld at Foxwoods a couple of weeks ago, in a massive ballroom, and he lambasted a heckler who was sitting at the back of the 2nd balcony, at least 70 yards from his mic stand. Detouring out of rehearsed material and into a conversation with a heckler is in a comic’s blood, and it should so too be part of how you use social media.
Marketing Takeaway:
You can schedule posts all you want, but a truly remarkable Read more…

Social media is like a loaded gun: You can use it to protect yourself or, as Anthony Weiner, Brett Favre and so many others have aptly demonstrated, you can also shoot yourself in the, um, foot, while the world watches — and retweets it.
But that doesn’t mean that you should ban guns — or snub social media like Facebook and Twitter. Companies shouldn’t be afraid of social media just because a few people shot themselves in the foot.
In fact, you’re making a big mistake if you’re NOT using social media. Twitter says it has about 200 million registered users and Facebook claims 600 million active users — you can’t ignore perhaps nearly a billion potential customers.
“If you’re not going where everyone is going to sit and talk and chat, then you’re going to miss out on an opportunity to be part of the conversation,” said Jason Sadler, who runs social media company “I Wear Your Shirt.” And here’s the best part, it’s cheap! You can sign up for a Twitter or Facebook account for free. And it’s far cheaper to hire a social media expert — in house or through a company like “I Wear Your Shirt” — than it is to make a commercial or buy advertising. In fact, social media companies like “I Wear Your Shirt” saw their business soar Read more…

Location based check-in type services are this year’s overhyped topic – with good reason. While you may not understand why someone wants to be the mayor of their barber shop, you do need to recognize the behavior that social location services such as Gowalla,Foursquare, Yelp! and Facebook Places represents for the local business.
Shoppers these days are using the Internet to find everything locally and increasingly using mobile devices, services and apps to effectively bypass even the web to find a merchant. What that means is that local small businesses need to find ways to tap into the behavior and not necessarily try to ride the hype wave to Foursquare fame.
Below are five ways the local small businesses can capture their own personalized version of social location behavior and tap what may be the ultimate online to offline combo to produce sales.
Create virtual rewards programs – Rewards programs such as those offered by most coffee shop via punch cards or large retailers like Eddy Bauer have been around for years, but smart offerings by folks like PlacePop are making the punch card concept an easy virtual or online play. Merchants can offer their own version of a check in and capture rich data on their most loyal customers.
Ride the group buying craze – If you’re not familiar with group coupon buying services like Groupon, then Read more…

You know what you’re supposed to do in social media. You’ve read the guides, the blog posts, the articles. But here’s a list of what you don’t want to do. They’re the common social media mistakes that others have made so you don’t have to.
Got a pen?
Creating profiles everywhere: You may want toclaim your username everywhere, but you don’t want to set up shop on every community on the Web. Instead, research the various sites and locate the ones that will give you the most bang for your buck. Not everyone should be on Twitter. Find out where your users are, where they’re interacting most, and where you’d be most welcome. Then, set up shop there. This will help you focus your efforts and prevent you from suffering from the dreaded Social Media Account Overload (SMAO). You don’t want to dilute your efforts by trying to be active on too many sites.  You want to pick and choose to find the sites most beneficial to you.
Not completing your profile: Once you decide which sites you’re going to engage in, you need to commit and genuinely become part of that network. That means being a good member of the community and completely filling out your user profile. Doing so helps you attract like-minded members but it also shows people that you’re here to stay.  Read more…

Every few years, a management book or philosophy emerges to change our thinking about the best ways to lead employees.
From The One Minute Manager to Who Moved My Cheese?, new and revived leadership concepts have shaped the way we organize, evaluate, inspire, and reward team members. With so many competing management theories in the mix, some ill-conceived practices were bound to take hold—and indeed, many have. Here’s our list of the 10 most brainless and injurious:
1. Forced Ranking
The idea behind forced ranking is that when you evaluate your employees against one another, you’ll see who’s most critical on the team and who’s most expendable. This theory rests on the notion that we can exhort our reports to work together for the sake of the team 364 days a year and then, when it really counts, pit them against one another in a zero-sum competitive exercise. That’s a decent strategy for TV shows such asSurvivor but disastrous for organizations that intend to stay in business for the long term. What to do instead: Evaluate employees against written goals and move quickly to remove poor performers all the time (not just once a year).
2. Front-Loaded Recruiting Systems
All the rage in the corporate hiring arena, so-called front-loaded hiring processes require candidates to surmount the Seven Trials of Hercules before earning so much as a phone Read more…