Category: Social Media
-
Explosion in mush and junk online content
We’ve seen an explosion in the volume of online content in two areas: “mush content” and “junk content”. Mush content is the type of writing you see in the “Pulse” section of LinkedIn. The point is typically to promote yourself with a generic feel-good publication. It is politically correct and typically designed to appeal to…
-
What I learned this week
I’ve adopted the habit of summarizing the things I’ve learned over the past week and posting a short note here on my personal blog. Normally I write this on Sunday but I was happy to spend yesterday at Cape May NJ walking through the Christmas displays. Several of the things I’ve learned this week focus…
-
Dealing with a new Freedom Benefits trademark scam
Internet scams are nothing new. We face all kinds today. Successful business brands face a unique type of scamming from people who want to capitalize from the good will and organic web traffic that a popular business or product name generates. Each year I find the need to defend against a handful of these problems. Some…
-
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum, the NJSCPA forum
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. That’s the NJ Society of Certified Public Accountant’s online discussion forum. I was involved in an online discussion about the unauthorized practice of law and how that affected me. What I discovered instead was how rapidly the positions of the U.S. bar associations have changed,…
-
Only three things in marketing
Yesterday I heard a bright young businessman quip that “There are only three things in marketing: Free, Sex, and You Can’t Have It”. It got me thinking. The fact is that for years of writing about health care reform, I’ve been covering “you can’t have it”. For the past four years, most of my work has…
-
Sources of my Freedom Benefits Web traffic
Over 85% of my collective Web visitors – typically 300 to 500 unique visitor per day – come from organic Google searches. The remainder come from a wider range of sources and referrers. It is interesting that the volume of traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is almost identical, a handful of people from each…
-
Recent criticism of my writing
I’ve written something, somewhere, intended for public exposure almost every day for the past 35 years. It started with the college newspaper then moved to electronic bulletin boards and early online class discussions. I was one of the first moderators for Financial Planning Online forum when peer-moderated professional groups thrived without spam. I wrote a…
-
Reflecting on 30+ years of writing
Tonight, on the eve of my 54th birthday, I am taking time to reflect on the impact of more than 30 years of business writing. I’ve never doubted that the pen is mightier than the sword and that the internet-connected keyboard absolutely blows away the pen. I’ve done a little bit of good with my effort.…
-
Personal branding vs. social media for CPAs
Yesterday during a ridiculously long drive home from the North Jersey office of the New Jersey Society of Certified Public Accountants I spent some time thinking about the issue of how personal branding intersects with social media. I concluded that I might be making some mistakes in both personal branding strategy and social media. On…
-
“10 things that Google knows to be true” and how it applies to my OnlineAdviser business
OnlineAdviser.org is a consumer service I founded in 1997 that answers questions free of charge. Additional low cost financial planning services are offered as add-on and these are referred out to other affiliated firms. I estimate that I’ve handled more than 50,000 consumer questions by telephone, e-mail, chat, text, social media sites and other media…