Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Happy Easter

[more images here] +++ Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here. Read more →

Connecting Talking with Doing

In short: doing is more compelling, it forces you to make sense of your logic and apply it within a real life scenario, focuses attention, encourages discipline, it makes good use of time, and you learn from it. So why is it so hard to make the connection between talking and doing? We should get together some time... Give me a call... I'll follow up... It would be neat to do something with that idea... What do all these statements have in common? They are generic would-if- I-should, some-time, someone-, something- kind of statements. Refreshing for your breath, yet neither... Read more →

Public Speaking: All You Ever Wanted to Learn

A couple of weeks ago, along with the sassy conversation at The Bean Cast, courtesy of Bob Knorpp, I was a guest on The Voice, the podcast by IABC Ottawa with host Alexandra Reid. Our conversation touches upon many hot buttons and questions marketers ask or wonder about when it comes to getting public speaking gigs. Learn how I started a speaker series to invite myself to the front of the room, the tricks I use when I get butterflies in front of a large audience, and why I enjoy moderating panels, even when I'm a panelist myself (photo of... Read more →

Successfull Organizations

Are those where individuals and teams connect with each other inside and outside the organization on a regular basis. We already know: the most effective channels are informal, self-directed, joined the more knowledge we share, the more we learn the most compelling experiences spread through word of mouth the best environments are created through open, opt-in, yes individuals Look around you today. Is that the kind of place you are building? Context matters. +++ Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement... Read more →

Content Readers are Hot

The skinny: with acquisitions of Zite, Pulse, and Summly respectively by CNN, Linkedin, and Yahoo, content readers are hot. Three is a trend. Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo. It's been more than two years since I published the beginnings of a list of power tools for content aggregation and curation, and content is hotter than ever. Posterous may be gone, and Google Reader on its way out, yet social magazines and news readers are exploding. Feedly, Pulse, Zite, and Newsblur are just a few examples of services ready to fill the void. Digg even announced it will develop a... Read more →

Customer Data is Your Biggest Advantage

The advantage: the widespread adoption of online tools to research, compare, validate, rate/review, recommend, and make purchases rewards data-driven organizations. Customer loyalty programs are rich with information about what people want to do. Only when they are conceived and executed to make it easy for customers to transact their points and rewards frequently, they become a valuable source of customer intelligence. The more exchanges of points and rewards for goods and services, the more your business learns about that customer preferences. What three free items is she choosing with her online order? How about over time -- a number of... Read more →

7 Common Business Pitfalls that Impact Social Strategy

Tactical fatigue getting you down? How about lack of results from your efforts? While it's become quite common to think about adding social media to existing marketing programs, there is an all common trend among those organizations that decide to add social. Get on Facebook and Twitter, start blogs, post videos on YouTube, maybe have a Google+ account and Pinterest boards. Now what? How about we hit the pause button and look at some areas of impact on your business first? Maybe you set out with an objective and quantifiable goals for your marketing plan and aligned social media to... Read more →

Twitter 7-Year Anniversary

After waiting a respectable period of time to see if it would survive, I created my first account on Twitter at the beginning of October 2007. I was going to write a long-ish post about Twitter 7-year anniversay for tomorrow. Then I thought of all the posts I have written about the social network over the years. The very highlights for your enjoyment, in chronological order. Twitter for Business Is it Time for Corporations to get a Twitter Presence (November 2007) Twitter is an interesting tool. Imagine you have an advisory council who will give you feedback on things that... Read more →

Perspective in Business

“I suppose I could make it less mentally taxing if I just sat there and didn’t make an effort to engage people or treat them like human beings (and there are some folks who do exactly that), but that’s not how I roll, and I will stop attending conventions before I become That Guy. That Guy has no perspective, no humility, no gratitude, and while I’ve met him a few times (there are a few people who act like fans at conventions are simply meatbags attached to wallets) I won’t ever be him.” [Wil Wheaton] I found the story wrapped... Read more →

Retail Media

There is more to place than coworking spaces and by the day office rentals. Retail is very much alive and thriving. In fact, the 5 retail trends applicable to your business still holds water -- or I should say coffee. I've been following the Startup Store, now Story, since it launched a couple of years ago. Story is located in Chelsea, New York City. The concept is about fusing retail and digital to create a new media context#. Bringing together content, community, and commerce into an experience founder Rachel Shechtman defined transactional storytelling. In the talk she gave at PSFK... Read more →