Toilet Paper Entrepreneur Gives Bad Advice about Online Marketing

Toilet Paper Entrepreneur
By Gloria Rand

If you’re a small business owner, you may have read The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, or seen its author Mike Michalowicz on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. The book is a no-holds-barred primer on starting a business.

I read Mike’s other book, The Pumpkin Plan, a year ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. But I had never gotten around to reading TPE until yesterday.

Full disclosure – I’m still not done with it. But one bit of advice stuck in my craw and I knew I had to write a blog article about it.

Read more

Social Media Marketing Lessons from Diana Nyad

Social Media Marketing Lessons

By Gloria Rand

U.S. endurance swimmer Diana Nyad made history on Monday afternoon, becoming the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Appropriately enough, Nyad completed the task – her fifth attempt since 1978 – on Labor Day.

After the swim, the 64-year-old swimmer said she had three messages, “One is we should never ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it’s a team.” 

Read more

Why I Like the New Facebook Insights

By Gloria Rand

Facebook is tweaking its Insights again, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s a change for the better.  Here is a breakdown of what’s changing:

  • The People Talking About This metric has been broken out into people engaged, the number of unique people who’ve clicked on, liked, commented on or shared your posts, and other page activity, which includes Page mentions, check-ins and posts by other people on your Page.
  • Virality (the percentage of people who created a story from your page, divided by the total number who’ve seen it) has been replaced with engagement rate, which is the percentage of people who saw a post that then clicked on, liked, commented on or shared it.
  • Read more