Peter Drakulich has 17 years in the automobile dealership industry, today he runs a company that optimizes sales for companies, Driving Up Sales. We were chatting recently and talked about the lead generation approaches using social media and trade shows:...

(and I think it works for lots of products) Is the purpose of the cover to sell books, to accurately describe what's in the book, or to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact? The third. It's...

One can't help but notice the brouhaha that Malcolm Gladwell tipped with his prominent dis-endorsement of Chris Anderson's latest book Free.

His New Yorker magazine review of the timely tome, which portends an age where all media content shall be set free, prompted many in the Twittersphere to weigh in (mostly in favor of Mr. Anderson's perspective).

Here's a smattering of what the pundits had to say starting with Mr. Gladwell:

• Malcolm Gladwell "Priced to Sell: Is Free the Future" "His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between 'paying people to get other people to write' and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?"

• Chris Anderson "Dear Malcolm: Why So Threatened" "So that’s the difference between 'paying people to write' and 'paying people to get other people to write'. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).

  It works great for all involved. Is it the model for the newspaper industry? Maybe not all of it, but it is the only way I can think of to scale the economics of media down to the hyperlocal level. And I can imagine far more subjects that are better handled by well-coordinated amateurs than those that can support professional journalists. My business card says “Editor in Chief”, but if one of my children follows in my footsteps, I suspect their business card will say “Community Manager.” Both can be good careers.

Amber Naslund writes about the five myths of community management: Social Networking Is All We Do It’s Always Online We’re Just Glorified PR (or Marketing) People It’s a Job Anyone Can Do You Can’t Measure the Impact I had a...

I've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go. Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about. The first...

It's easy to to adopt the policy of avoiding risk at all costs, that whenever possible, the products you launch or the engagements you have should be flawless and without downside. Here's the problem: in most endeavors, a small increase...

Measuring company goals in social media all depends upon what those goals are, be they: Sales, higher SEO rankings, crisis communications, thought leadership etc. In this post I provide five social media goals and some strategies for measuring those goals....

Often it’s the small twists and tweaks to ‘established practices’ that can really take things in a new direction — case in point, I was recently reading your run-of-the-mill-mega-company-internal announcement, however, this one was followed by several supporting points pre-packaged in 140 character tweets with all the shortened links and hashtags served right on top. [...]

I’ve been asked by quite a few people what I am looking for in my next role. Given my experience in marketing, 20 years, it all started with IBM in Hampshire, United Kingdom in 1988, and involvement in the online...

The IT or, to give it it's full name, the ICT industry has led a pretty charmed life. After being a participant for over forty three years, it amazes me that it still manages to buck trends; from ever more...