Internet and Social Media Archives - My Quest for the Best

Social Media for Business – Featured Interview with Linda Coles

Author, Keynote Speaker, Owner of Blue Banana

Linda Coles talks with Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about the use of social media for business growth, emphasizing that when you connect with social media to remember that you’re connecting with other people who prefer authenticity and candor.

Key points that you’ll learn from this interview:

The truly hard part about building a website.
Why you should consider giving out bite sized teasers of your knowledge.
How to determine the size of your audience, and how to go about building it.
The social media tactics that people may know about, but don’t use enough.
Insider tips for getting more likes, shares, and comments.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:55 Linda tells about her goats, fig farm, and her business Blue Banana.

3:45 How a gluten intolerance became the impetus for Linda to build her first website, and eventually allowed her to expand her business to help build website traffic for others.

4:03 “People that build websites know that that’s the easy part, getting traffic to it is the hard part.”

6:12 [On Malcolm Gladwell’s search for stories] – “He doesn’t wait for them to happen, he looks for them to happen.”

7:06 “I like to give freely, I like to give my information away. There’s no point in just keeping that to me.”

8:36 Linda discusses the process of writing her first book and getting it published.

9:43 “You don’t have to give all the tools in your toolbox away, but if you can give them some taster of the sort of information [with which] you can help them.”

12:08 “The one thing you need is distribution, because without a distribution channel it’s not going to go anywhere.”

13:18 Why audience size matters to publishers.

15:33 How one of the women Linda follows is optimizing LinkedIn for her business.

16:37 Why you should do audio recordings of your work.

18:22 “As an individual trying to get your name and your brand moving, think about audio.”

19:10 “People listen to the person.”

22:21 How to generate buzz around your podcast.

23:14 “You do have to have some budget in the early days to get something moving.”

24:04 “All companies need to have a [LinkedIn] company page, but growing your company page is hard work.”

26:00 “Have a great image, and steer away from stock images.”

26:54 “Tell the people what the article is about, for sure, but don’t try to be clever, just be clear.”

28:23 “Try and write something that’s evergreen.”

28:59 How Linda helped a client in the healthcare sector improve their business on Social Media.

32:52 [The importance of conversation on Social Media] – “Don’t forget that [with social media] you’re talking to other humans.”

Expert Bio

Linda Coles has been in the digital space for many years. She moved to New Zealand 10 years ago, where she first started out on the road as a Regional Manager for an optics chain. She soon realized that freelancing was the better life for her, and gave up working for other people altogether to spend time writing and consulting. Since then, she’s worked with a number of clients, published four books on marketing, and another six books in the suspense genre.

LinkedIn made her an “Influencer” when the program was launched back in 2012, along with Branson and 148 other thought leaders at the time. Last year, she flew out to New York to be a part of Thrillerfest where I met Lee Child and shared a cab to the FBI offices with Heather Graham and Dennis.

She has presented to Transpower, Microsoft, and Fidelity Life among many others and has worked with professionals at major New Zealand companies including Wolters Kluwer, and the University of Auckland Business School and. Her articles have been published on the Huffington Post, LinkedIn, Mashable.com, the NZ Herald, NZBusiness Magazine, Management Magazine, Human Resources Magazine, and Social Media Examiner. She’s also the host of the podcast Tell Us a Story, where she features entrepreneurs and creators who have interesting tales to tell.

For more information, visit Linda Cole’s Website.

Contact Info for Linda Coles

Web address: https://www.bluebanana.co.nz

Travels from: Mercer, Auckland, NZ

Contact:

Resources Mentioned by Linda Coles

Make the Most of Your Strengths – Featured Interview with Stefan Swanepoel

Internationally Bestselling Author and Motivational Speaker

Stefan Swanpoel talks with Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about embracing you you are, and reveals some industry secrets about how to become a bestselling author.

Listen to this interview to learn:

Marketing secrets from a prolific, bestselling author.
How he designed his book to have wide appeal through social media and traditional channels.
Lessons about becoming comfortable with who you are and making the most of your strengths in business and in life.

Expert Bio

Stefan Swanepoel is an international best-selling author of 20 books on business trends, real estate, and social media, as well as a motivational keynote speaker with over 700 presentations to 500,000 people.

His most popular real estate books include the Amazon.com bestseller Real Estate confronts Reality and the annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report. His most recent book, Surviving Your Serengeti: 7 Skills to Master Business and Life, is a New York Times bestseller, and his other titles have been featured on the bestseller lists of the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and many others.

Stefan has held offices as President, CEO and Chairman of a technology company, an education company, a non-profit association, a movie studio and a 2,000 office international franchise. He has also received numerous awards, including: “Businessman of the Year” (Jaycees), one of the “Top 20 Most Influential People in the Real Estate Industry” (Today’s REALTOR®), and “One of the Top 50 People Who You Should Follow on Twitter” (Roost).

For more information, visit Stefan’s website.

Contact Info for Stefan Swanepoel

Web address for Real Estate Trends: RETrends.com

Web address for Serengeti Book: SerengetiBook.com

Travels From: Los Angeles, CA

Connect with Stefan:

Books by Stefan Swanepoel

Mastering New Media – Featured Interview with Barbara Henricks and Rusty Shelton

President & CEO of Cave Henricks Communications

CEO of Shelton Interactive, Speaker & Author

Barbara Henricks and Rusty Shelton talk with Bill Ringle about how traditional media and social media reinforce each other to build an audience for thought leaders and brands.

Key points that you’ll learn from this interview:

How the mind shift from marketer to media exec helps you stay open and develop new opportunities
The key differences between owned media, rented media, and earned media, and why that matters to your business
That traction can be measured with new media: with the interactions on your blog posts and subscribers to your audience list
The #1 factor to focus on to be successful with new media: creating content that your audience wants to share
How Tom Rath used a quiz in Strengths Finder 2.0 to gain more than 160,000 subscribers, and what 2 techniques new authors (who aren’t already famous) can use to build a subscriber list quickly

Expert Bios

Barbara Cave Henricks is president of Cave Henricks Communications. She has spearheaded campaigns for some of the biggest names in business today, including Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, John Bogle, Tom Rath, Marcus Buckingham, Maria Bartiromo, and Clay Christensen.

Rusty Shelton is the founder and CEO of Shelton Interactive, an award-winning digital marketing and PR agency that helps clients, from bestselling authors to the world’s biggest brands, start conversations that matter. He has led digital strategy for more than twenty-five New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers.

For more information, visit Barbara’s website and Rusty’s website.

Contact Info for Barbara Henricks and Rusty Shelton

Barbara Henricks:

Web address: http://www.cavehenricks.com

Travels from: Austin, TX

Phone: (512)-301-8936

Contact:

Rusty Shelton:

Web address: http://www.rustyshelton.com

Travels from: Austin, TX

Phone: (512)-206-0720

Contact:

Resources Mentioned by Barbara Henricks and Rusty Shelton:

Website: Mastering the New Media Landscape
Website: Tom Rath’s Strengths Finder 2.0
Website: The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
Website: David Livermore, expert on cultural intelligence and author of Driven by Difference
Website: Annie’s book planning technique of using poster boards and post-it notes

Defining Data Breaches – Interview with Fred Wilf

Founder of Wilftek LLC.

In this episode of My Quest for the Best, Fred Wilf discusses recent data breaches and the unique nature of privacy policies in the U.S., and explains what could cause a lawyer to develop such an interest in technology.

Key points that you’ll learn from this interview:

Why it’s essential for businesses to make customer security a priority
The ins and outs of Data Breach Notification Laws
How Privacy Laws differ from country to country
The reasons why continuing tech education is needed
How governments can encourage technological development

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:20 Wilf tells about his early work experience.

2:18 “Policy was always something that interested me in terms of how the policies chosen by governments and by people affected others. And in many ways, long term policy decisions will lead to short term life and death decision.”

3:30 [On an early fascination with technology] “I was always a bit of a tinkerer, and known for pulling stuff apart from an early age.”

4:44 “People didn’t understand why a lawyer would have any interest in computers.”

5:22 [Profiles of the Ideal Client] – “There are are several profiles for my ideal client. One profile is the funded startup, they have some money, they’re able to carry out their strategy, they’re moving towards sales and revenue positive as quickly as possible.”

5:42 “For the larger companies that I work with, a number of Fortune 500 companies, I tend to be more specific as to their needs, filling in where they don’t already have someone in house or outside.”

6:35 Healthcare company case study, and how Wilf used his expertise in privacy and copyright law to help them problem solve.

8:00 The two ways Wilf helps with clients.

8:51 Wilf describes some common areas of legal misunderstanding.

9:38 “Privacy law has the foundation from country to country, state to state, but implemented in a very different from manner from state to state and country to country, and most people don’t know when they get into this how to navigate those changes.”

10:36 “One of the principles in privacy law is that a company or entity that controls individual personal info must explain to those individuals how that information is being used, processed, and stored.”

11:22 The importance of transparency, and privacy policies, in handling consumer information.

12:45 “Users can certainly educate themselves and have a better understanding of how their data is being used. Maybe that will change who they share data with, and maybe it won’t.”

13:24 “The transparency is not there because all consumers will use it, because frankly consumers won’t, the transparency is there for those users who want to control how their data is being used.”

13:50 How UBER failed to be transparent in their use of consumer data.

16:15 The case of Target’s privacy breach, and how the technology of the time couldn’t have prevented it, but whether the executive decision makers could have.

17:19 “One aspect that needs to change is that businesses need to use as much security as they can afford.”

17:44 “Consumers need to understand that some of these attacks can be prevented, some of these attacks, I don’t think they could’ve been prevented really.”

18:11 “The reason why we know about the Target case, and this is an interesting aspect of policy, is that we now have a series of laws called data breach notification laws where Target, or any other company who is breached, is required to notify all the people whose information is in the database that’s been hacked.”

19:18 [On Data Breach Notification Laws] – “If if wasn’t for that change of policy, I’m not sure we’d have as much interest in privacy or security that we have today,”

20:31 The differences between US and EU Privacy Law.

23:52 “Different governments in different countries have their very different view on foreign privacy.”

24:08 “The more stringent a privacy law is, the more expensive it is to implement those laws to the businesses who have to implement them.”

25:56 “Some of the technology needs to be changed so that clicking on a link…isn’t going to affect the servers containing personal information.”

27:05 “Whatever you’re doing with policy, whatever you’re doing in technology, this has real world consequences for users.”

28:18 “Information Technology is still relatively premature.”

28:53 “There’s still a huge gap between the users of the technology, which today is everybody, and those who use the technology well.”

29:27 “Because we don’t know how the technology works, it’s on the tech professionals to make the technology easier to use and more bulletproof.”

31:53 “The government has shown, perhaps wisely, that it’s not very good at defining technology standards, they’ve mostly left that up to the tech companies to define their own standards.”

33:00 How governments can encourage the development of technological standards.

34:32 “Governments, through it’s contracting process, and buying technology, can encourage the developments of better, stronger, more secure systems.”

35:10 Sources where people can stay abreast of privacy and security issues.

Expert Bio

Fred Wilf is an attorney who represents people and companies for technology and intellectual property issues. Briefly working as a programmer during college, Fred used that experience as a spur to investigate the intersection of technology, intellectual property and business for the last 30+ years. About half of Fred’s experience has been in large law firms (Saul Ewing and Morgan Lewis), while the other half has been in small and boutique law, firms, including his current practice, Wilftek LLC. For some companies, Fred is the outside general counsel, helping with any and all legal issues that may arise. For other companies, especially the larger companies, Fred focuses on particular types of technology agreements and consulting. In addition to his work for clients, Fred writes, speaks and teaches on topics in technology law, and provides pro bono legal services to charities and other non-profits.

For more information, visit Fred Wilf’s company website.

Contact Info for Fred Wilf

Web address: http://www.wilftek.com/

Travels from: Worcester, PA

Phone: (215) 205-0059

Follow, connect, and learn from this guest’s social media channels:

Resources Mentioned by Fred Wilf on My Quest for the Best:

USPTO.gov

ftc.gov

iapp.org

9 Steps to a Better Bottom Line – Featured Interview with Dorriah Rogers

Founder of Paradyne Consulting Works

In this episode of My Quest for the Best, Dorriah Rogers talks with Bill Ringle about the principles and benefits described in Decide to Profit.

Key points that you’ll learn from this interview:

The impact a mentor had on Rogers’ life and career, and how he inspired her to be her own person.
How the Lego company used a single, unified goal to really turn things around.
The importance of not only giving everyone in the company or organization, not just the decision makers, a voice.
How to teach employees to tie their ideas to the overarching goal: making money.
Rogers’ 9 steps to a better bottom line.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:15: [On the mentorship of Tom Schumacher] – “[Schumacher] inspired me to be a problem-solver and a speaker, and he showed great faith in my abilities and always pushed me to be my own person.”

1:59: “I’ve never really been an employee. I’m what I call a serial entrepreneur.”

2:20: [On what it means to be your own person] – “Not being easily influenced by either peer pressure, social pressure, or any other types of pressure that may exist either in the workplace or in society.”

2:44: The 3 primary aspects of any business.

3.27: [On finding and keeping clients] – “I’ve started with a handful of people that I’ve come in contact with, and they saw what I was doing, they saw my work ethic and my reputation, and some of them gave me a chance. That’s really all it took, was getting my foot in the door.”

4:07 [Characteristics of an ideal client] – “I think one of the primary characteristics, more than anything, is openness. What I mean by openness is openness to change.”

4:36 [On client transparency] – “I’ve gone into situations where I talked to some of the key managers, and although they recognize they have a problem, they don’t recognize that they need to change. And they’re not willing to look in the mirror.”

6:30 [On asking the difficult questions] – “I may attend a meeting, and I may interrupt the meeting and say something to the leader, or maybe even the CEO or exec, and challenge them in front of the team. Saying ‘hey, why are you asking that question?’ or ‘hey, it may be a good idea for you to listen to some of the other input.’ Or perhaps, ‘We haven’t heard from Jim, let’s hear what Jim thinks.”

7:14 “I really challenge people to get outside of their own heads, to push them to think and behave differently.”

7:54 [On building trust with clients] – “Before I begin any of the real work, I will spend a lot of one on one time with the decision maker. I will get to know them as people. I will ask them a lot of questions. I will get them to what I call the comfort point. And also, I will ask their permission. I will let them know that I will ask hard questions, and get their permission to do so.”

8:55 Rogers’ Inspiration for writing Decide to Profit: The 9 Steps in a Better Bottom Line

10:40 The nine steps in a better bottom line.

12:00 [On the importance of understanding the goal] – “A lot of people get mired in the day to day tasks and activities. And they kind of grind through their day. They have a tendency not to stay focused on the bigger picture.”

12:30 [The fundamental driving force behind the company] – “My whole purpose in writing both the book, and identifying the goal – as one of the steps, is to keep people focused on the bigger picture. And in any company, and any organization…the fundamental driving force behind the company is making money. So there’s an overarching financial goal.”

12:55 “And my idea was, have everybody within the organization tie every decision that they are making to the larger goals of the organization. Number 1 has to always be: making money.”

13:30 [On the importance of quality] – “The quality of your product, that also has to be a goal. You can’t make money and sacrifice quality, because that’s not sustainable.”

13:40 [Deciding the profit] – “Every organization can have 1, 2, or 3 goals that they are primarily focused on. And if you make sure that everyone knows what those goals are, and tie their day to day decisions to them, that’s how you can decide the profit.”

14:04 The importance of keeping day to day decision in line with organizational goals

15:10 The Lego study

16:09 [Sacred cows] – “In some of the companies that I’ve worked with, I see them hold on to business decisions, or I see them hold on to product. I even see them hold on to no-productive people. And all of this is counterintuitive, and it’s not in alignment with the overall goals of the organization.”

16:32 [On unified goals] – “[The lego study] shows how one single unified goal enabled a company to completely turn around.”

17:31 [On teams holding themselves accountable] – “Have you ever been in a meeting where there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of ideas, and everyone leaves the meeting and 90% of the ideas and discussion has been forgotten? That’s what I experience in a lot of the companies I work with. There’s a lot of ideas, a lot of good discussion, a lot of innovative discussion, yet nobody ever captured the discussion, nobody ever circled back – there was no feedback loop, and there was no accountability.”

18:23 [On accountability] – “What makes people accountable can be something as simple as an action list. And I don’t mean minutes, I don’t mean a detailed list of who said what verbatim. I mean, a ‘we talked about this, we decided to do this, this person owns it, and this is when they’re going to get it done.’”

19:45 [On employee contribution] – “In the book I have a tool for employees to do a very straightforward return on investment analysis. One of the disconnects that I was increasingly becoming aware of is that managers would often miss ideas because they couldn’t see how that idea would benefit the organization.”

20:16 [On helping employees choose ideas that are tied to financial goals] “The benefit of the 9th step is that it provides employees a tool and a methodology to demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively how to give an investment to the organization and show how their idea will either improve the financial goals or other goals.”

21:38 The importance of checklists and forms for employees.

23:00 [On brainstorming] – “The people that make the decisions tend to shoot down the ideas of those that don’t make the decisions. Allowing people to free think, allowing for ideas to be equally valuable no matter who they’re coming from, is very, very important. All of the rules that I put down for brainstorming are a result of all of those rules being broken during brainstorming meeting I’ve been to.”

24:21 Rogers describes the timeline and process of writing Decide to Profit: 9 Steps to a Better Bottom Line

25:03 “The book isn’t written for specialists. The book is not meant to be a dissertation on continuous improvement or operational streamlining or productivity. It’s meant to be a comprehensive overview of all of it, and it’s meant to be understandable, and it’s meant to be utilized by both managers and employees.”

26:06 Discoveries Rogers made during the writing process.

26:50 [On staying humble] – “I found that I fall prey to a lot of the same things that executives fall prey to, which is, believing my own press, believing my ideas are the best, believing that only my opinions count. I’ve found that really listening to the people around me makes a big difference.”

27:00 Rogers discusses some of the milestones in her career, and the significant clients she’s worked with

28:42 The two primary factors of inefficiency, and the importance of time management.

30:12 Roger’s preferred tools for productivity during travel.

Expert Bio

Dorriah Rogers, Ph.D., began her career in the engineering and advanced technology industry in the late 1990s. She founded Paradyne Consulting Works in 2003, and brings almost 20 years of unique experience providing guidance to numerous Fortune 500 organizations throughout North America. She specializes in identifying and solving issues affecting efficiency, productivity, and profitability. Her client base includes Fortune 100 organizations, as well as the Department of Defense, U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. As CEO of Paradyne Consulting Works, she has led her team in the areas of productivity and process improvement, strategic business planning, operational streamlining, profitability, and organizational change management.

For more information, visit Dorriah Rogers’s company website.

Contact Info for Dorriah Rogers

Web address: http://www.paradyneconsulting.com/

Travels from: Thousand Oak, CA

Phone: 858-442-4295

Follow, connect, and learn from this guest’s social media channels:

Resources Mentioned by Dorriah Rogers on My Quest for the Best:

The Ridiculously High Cost of Not Listening – Featured Interview with Chuck Wall

Author and Founder of Customer CEO

Founder of Customer CEO Chuck Wall talks to Bill Ringle about brand recognition and the ridiculously high cost of not listening to your customer.

Listen to this interview to learn:

The big idea behind why Starbucks ≠ coffee and how it has helped the company prosper
Insights into the Clayton Christensen model of looking at what work needs to be done
What it really means when a company is customer-centric and how that becomes a competitive advantage
The transformation you can use to turn pain points into gain points at your company
How to avoid the trap of becoming overly dependent on big data analysis

Expert Bio

Chuck Wall is the founder of Customer CEO, a customer insight, engagement and marketing consultancy. For the past 15 years, Chuck has passionately taught organizations about the genuine value of understanding their customers in order to facilitate growth.

Based on his work of more than 100,000 customer interviews and suverys, Chuck’s new book Customer CEO: How to Profit from the Power of Your Customers explores how companies can navigate the new business dynamic that customers are primary decision makers in business.

As an expert in explaining unmet needs of customers through primary research, Chuck translates his knowledge into actionable insight to help organizations design innovative products, services, and experiences. He aims to serve every customer with gratitude and humility, inspire through example and teach practical business solutions that will help contriubute to a better world.

Prior to launching Customer CEO, Chuck started six other enterprises across multiple industries, including manufacturing, media, technology, marketing and insurance. A serial entrepreneur, Chuck has a deep understanding of entrepreneurship, business, strategy and marketing and is passionate about sharing that knowledge with others.

Chuck has shared his knowledge working as a business strategy and marketing advisor to companies of every size. His clients have included HP, Intel, Campbell’s Soup and Yahoo!.

For more information, visit Chuck’s blog.

Contact Info for Chuck Wall

Travels From: Austin, TX

Web address: CustomerCEObook.com

Follow Chuck:

Books by Chuck Wall

Staying on the Bleeding Edge – Featured Interview with Mitch Joel

Award-winning Social Media Expert and President of Twist Image

Social Media Expert Mitch Joel talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about brand recognition, Walmart, and the biggest changes in the industry since the 1990s.

Listen to this interview to learn:

How when you help brands stay on the leading edge, you often have to stay on the bleeding edge
Changes that are occurring between the pure play ad agencies vs. the digital agencies
Impact of reaching customers when they have many choices of screens, from desktop to iPad/tablet to mobile
Fundamental tenets of customer engagement that still guide online marketing strategies
What Walmart did differently to engage customers around a Mother’s Day campaign led by Twist Image

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:07 How Joel started his career as a rock journalist and how that experience allowed him to “cut his teeth” on writing and marketing.

2:23 “My real role is business development, everything I do is sort of filtered back to the agency.”

2:45 “I thought, well, I love to write and I love to publish and communicate so why don’t I put my thoughts about the marketing and media landscape out there and see if that attracts a certain type of client?”

3:51 “Helping brands stay at the leading edge forces us to be at the bleeding edge.”

4:26 “Brands want to connect more to their consumers, they want to build more loyalty, they want to create more attention, they want to get customers to spread the gospel for them.”

5:06 Joel recounts the biggest changes in the agency world since the 90s.

5:52 “I think for us it’s been the exploration of other interesting areas of products and services that we can bring to clients.”

7:23 [On engaging customers] – “It’s not just about putting a marketing message in front of them with these tools. These tools allow them to be hyperconnected, completely untethered, and they’re doing things in different environments.”

8:15 How a change in platform allowed Walmart to do a successful Mother’s Day marketing push that effectively engaged its audience.

10:31 “If we do everything right, we have to be prepared for success. Most brands aren’t prepared for success.”

11:26 “Anyone can have an idea and publish that idea in text, images, audio, and video – and what that means is that suddenly you have the ability to publish content, because you can, but to connect in a very real way.”

11:50 “While everybody’s getting more connected in more and more places, brands are still trying to disrupt or jump in on it, versus trying to figure out how to connect within it.”

12:30 “I believe that the winners are the people doing compelling things, and actually it’s a very slow, long, hard, and arduous process to build connections.”

13:21 “Instead of chasing how many likes people have of your company, why not go out and like your customers?”

14:25 “There seems to be a friction between the B2B world and social media, which to me is somewhat quizzical. I think the primary driver of B2B sales is driven by relationships and white papers and testimonials and that sort of more robust marketing endeavors. [It] seems to me that social media is a more compelling platform to share and distribute that type of content in a much more personal way.”

16:05 Joel discusses visions of a future world with products without brands.

16:57 “There seems to me like there’s this interest and burgeoning trend around indie brands and people connecting to things that are less about the logo…and more about the individual.”

17:26 “I think all trends are worthy of paying attention to.”

17:48 “The lessons for me are really about just being aware of new things and I think it’s the new things and how they connect to one another that makes branding and marketing and communications that much more interesting.”

18:28 “I get really excited about the possibility about what it means to have a relationship with a consumer.”

18:58 “Marketers can create things.”

19:22 The phenomena of “Utilitarianism Marketing.”

20:10 “It is staggering to me what one person with a laptop can do.”

Expert Bio

Mitch Joel is President of Twist Image, an award-winning Digital Marketing and Communications agency. He is also a blogger, podcaster, passionate entrepreneur, and speaker who connects with people worldwide by sharing his marketing insights on digital marketing and new media.

Marketing Magazine dubbed Mitch the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing” and called him “one of North America’s leading digital visionaries.” In 2006 he was named one of the most influential authorities on Blog Marketing in the world. In 2008, Mitch was named Canada’s Most Influential Male in Social Media, one of the top 100 online marketers in the world, and was awarded the highly prestigious Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. Most recently, Mitch was named one of iMedia’s 25 Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators in the world.

His first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his successful Blog and Podcast, is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT DEL, will be out in Spring 2013. Mitch is frequently called upon to be a subject matter expert for BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and many other media outlets. His newspaper business column, New Business – Six Pixels of Separation, runs bi-monthly in both The Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun and he also has a regular column, Media Hacker, on The Huffington Post.

For more information, visit Mitch’s website.

Contact Info for Mitch Joel

Business Phone: 514-987-9992

Web address: TwistImage.com

Blog: TwistImage.com/Blog

Travels From: Montréal, Canada

Follow Mitch:

Books by Mitch Joel

Ubertrending – Featured Interview with Michael Tchong

Change Agent and Founder of Social Revolution

Michael Tchong talks with Bill Ringle about Ubertrends and how they are shaping our business opportunities and personal lives.

Listen to this interview to learn:

Why analytics will become increasingly important to companies in planning
The Ubertrends of multitasking and control freak that technology has created
What to look for in global competition
How it is smart to use the technology you write about for clients to gain an advantage in your own business
Favorite sources to study to learn about Ubertrends in society, technology, and global business

Expert Bio

Michael Tchong is an innovation specialist, change agent, entrepreneur, and speaker. He is the founder of five startups, including MacWEEK and ICONOCAST, and has pioneered ventures in desktop publishing, personal information management, internet analytics, and online marketing. His latest startup is Social Revolution®, which aims to reinvent America by crowdsourcing innovative solutions.

As a speaker, Michael uses his knowledge of marketing, media, and technology to help audiences better grasp how massive waves, which he calls “Ubertrends,” are reshaping society, as well as the opportunities and innovations these Ubertrends propel. His ability to identify emerging trends was refined at such prestigious ad agencies as DDB and Chiat/Day. He is the author of Social Engagement Marketing, an easy-to-navigate guide to the world of social media.

For more information, visit Michael’s website.

Contact Info for Michael Tchong

Web address: MichaelTchong.com

Web address: ubercool.com

Travels From: San Francisco, CA

Follow Michael:

Books by Michael Tchong

Building Great Relationships – Featured Interview with Elaine Pofeldt

Independent journalist specializing in careers and entrepreneurship

New York, NY

Listen to this interview to learn:

Keys to building great relationships with clients
How the criteria you use for evaluating opportunities change as you change your business vision
The central role of courage for succeeding as an entrepreneur
How trusting your observations and taking action lead to success
Important networking advice for corporate managers and leaders

Expert Bio

Elaine Pofeldt is an independent journalist who specializes in writing about careers and entrepreneurship. When she was a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine, she was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for her feature stories.

She went freelance in October 2007 and has since written for publications including Fortune Money Forbes and a variety of other print and online publications. At Crain’s New York Business, she is a contributing editor, focused on the weekly’s small business coverage. She writes a how-to column and one on startups, called Startup Scene. At Fortune, she writes a column called David vs. Goliath, looking at small companies that are taking on giant competitors.

Having built traffic Fortune Small Business Online from a fledgling site to one with 2 million to 5 million page views a month, she frequently draws on her experience to help clients improve their online presence. She also founded Fortune Small Business’s national Business Plan Competition and ran it for 5 years.

For more information, visit Elaine’s website.

Contact Info for Elaine Pofeldt

Web address: ElainePofeldt.com and $200K Freelancer
Travels From: New York, NY
Follow Elaine:

The Oracle Question – Featured Interview with Dave Logan

Co-Founder and Senior Partner of Culture Sync, Author New York, NY

In this interview, Dave Logan talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about the role of management in business.

Listen to this interview to learn:

What’s easy vs. important.
What to do if something unexpected comes along.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

0:59 Dave discusses how he became interested in business, and talks about the role that management plays in business.

1:34 Dave’s father enjoyed his job until management changed, which is what Dave considers the catalyst of interest in working on fixing the “conspiracy toward mediocrity.”

4:10 “Running a company… requires a lot of raw intelligence.”

7:22 “When people are struggling, they do what’s easy rather than do what’s right.”

7:55 Dave talks about an addiction to the status quo, and that often businesses don’t want to rock the boat when they really should be changing with the times.

9:03 Even when it’s uncomfortable, often the best thing for businesses leaders is to get out of the way of others who can do their job better.

10:14 Business leaders must follow their gut and intuition when answering important questions.

10:40 Dave brings up the Oracle Question: “What is likely to happen in the business if nothing unexpected comes along?”

11:05 People act as if their answer to the Oracle Question is the right answer, but depending on their answer, this can negatively impact the business.

11:41 Dave lists the ways in which this sense of superiority can cause a lack of forward movement and growth.

12:21 “Even if they are preaching vision and change and growth… when you actually examine what they do, there’s a default future, the answer to the Oracle Question, that is something other than they are preaching, and they and other people are actively bringing that about. And I think that’s the most important question that business leaders can ever ask.”

12:51 Dave gives an example of a business with which he has worked that was not aware of this questioning process, which led to an undesirable default future.

18:34 “When you actually figure it out and implement it, there’s this wave of enthusiasm and relief and passion and innovation, and every thing that people want ends up happening naturally. You don’t need to bribe people into innovating; they just do it.”

19:34 Dave tells us that there are four things that a business needs to get right, and that there is at least one of the four that need attention: Strategy, Structure, Systems and Processes, and Culture.

20:23 There is an instrument on Dave’s website that can help a business leader find which of the four needs to be reviewed.

21:26 Most of what analysts have written about Culture is dead wrong, and Dave’s book Tribal Leadership discusses how to get it right.

22:14 DaveLogan.com contains a free download for the audiobook of Tribal Leadership, a free instrument called Fix Your Company, and other instruments that can rate a business’ culture.

22:50 The objective of these free instruments on his website is to help a business leader see what is really going on in one’s company.

23:12 Dave was surprised to learn that very few employees would devote themselves to the company’s values, regardless of the bottom line.

25:20 One of the most widespread problems in management is that many of the management techniques are out of date.

Expert Bio

Dave Logan studies how people communicate within a company — and how to harness our natural gifts to make change within organizations. He looks at emerging patterns of corporate leadership, organizational transformation, generational differences in the workplace, and team building for high-potential managers and executives.

He’s the co-founder and senior partner at CultureSync, a management consulting firm, and works with Fortune 500 companies, governments, and nonprofits. Much of CultureSync’s work is derived from a ten-year study of over 24,000 people published at Tribal Leadership (2008), which shows how organizational culture evolves over time and how leaders can nudge it forward.

For more information, view Dave on CultureSync.net

Contact Info for Dave Logan

Web address: CultureSync.net

Follow Dave:

Books by Dave Logan

Digital Convergence Marketing – Interview with Fred Catona

Chief Marketing Strategist for Bulldozer Digital

Listen to this interview to learn:

The most memorable lesson he learned from Priceline founder, Jay Walker
Why having a message foundation is the critical step to get right for a marketer
How to leverage the speed and feedback advantages of direct response radio advertising
What role the trust agent plays in marketing for businesses that range from medical practices to travel, especially if you have a skeptial audience
What specific criteria you can use to decide if radio advertising can help you grow your business

Expert Bio

Fred Catona is the Founder and Chief Marketing Strategist for Bulldozer Digital, a full-service advertising and marketing company that specializes in Digital Convergence Marketing. Fred has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Entrepreneur Magazine and over 100 TV, radio, magazine and online media outlets.

After graduating from East Stroudsburg University, Fred taught school for twelve years during which time he became an award-winning teacher and successful coach. During the later part of his teaching career, he started The Taste of Philadelphia which became one of the first companies to ship perishable food products overnight nationally.

In 1993, Fred founded Radio Direct Response, the first advertising company to focus solely on radio as its advertising medium. Fred developed and pioneered Direct Response Radio, an extremely effective method to generate sales and sales leads. DRR is easily manageable, measurable and cost effective.

Jay Walker, the Founder of Priceline.com, turned to Fred and Radio Direct Response in 1995 to launch Priceline.com whose valuation grew to $20 billion in just 18 months. RDR has had numerous successful advertising campaigns with other notable companies such as Free Credit Report.com and Disneyonline.

Fred is currently plowing new fields by drawing upon his vast expertise in Direct Response Radio, and its immense lead generating capabilities, by developing a natural progression into the digital world with Radio-Digital Convergence Marketing.

In addition to his executive responsibilities with his companies, Fred does consulting and is a frequent guest speaker. He has also long time active member of Big Brothers of America.

Visit Fred’s Wikipedia page for more information.

Contact Info for Fred Catona:

No further contact info is available for Fred.

Travels From: Philadelphia, PA

The Power of Unpopular – Interview with Erika Napoletano

Author, Speaker, and Brand Consultant

Boulder, CO

Listen to this interview to learn:

The business mindset of caring about the success of your clients first
The perspective of major brands that don’t mind being unpopular with given market segments
The power of having your audience spread your message for greater impact and reach

Expert Bio

Erika Napoletano has been hailed by Forbes as a “spinless spin doctor” for her perspectives on business, marketing, and branding. She’s a twice-published author, most recently of The Power of Unpopular; a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine; recent speaker at TEDx Boulder; and speaker at conferences across the U.S. on brand development, social tactics for launching companies, and the inherent power of truth in business… or as she refers to it, the power of unpopularity.

Erika is also the Head Redhead at RHW Media, a branding consulting firm that helps businesses get unstuck and over those annoying problems that keep them from being awesome.

In conjunction with selected public relations firms, she develops comprehensive strategies to help companies develop lasting relationships with their customers and clients. And perhaps most importantly, she helps brands become human – because there’s no such thing as B2B or B2C. Business is always H2H – human to human.

For more information, visit Erika’s website.

Contact Info for Erika Napoletano

Web address: ErikaNapoletano.com

Erika’s TEDx Talk: TEDx Boulder

Travels From: Boulder, CO

Follow Erika:

Books by Erika Napoletano

Why the Future of Business is Sharing: Featured Interview with Lisa Gansky

Marketect, Author, and Business Advisor

Lisa Gansky talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about how capital flows into startup, entrepreneurship, and the early days of the internet.

Listen to this interview to learn:

How successful companies are built on incredibly talented, committed people
An early insight about how the Internet would level the playing field led to forming a startup acquired by AOL
Implications of how technology advances have lowered the barriers to entry dramatically
Where to find entrepreneurs creating new ideas and companies in major cities
Where on the balance sheet many companies can find underutilized and undervalued assets
How the meshing.it database became the foundation for both the book as well as an open source resource
Clues and tips for finding life-work balance

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:32 [On being an entrepreneur] – “The ability to see an opportunity or to hear someone with a really great idea and recognize it, that’s the number one thing.”

2:13 “Being an entrepreneur is more jazz than symphony, it’s more impromptu.”

2:59 Gansky tells the story of her Russian Immigrant entrepreneur grandfather and his linen business – “I learned many things from him. One of which was his incredible way of reading people and interacting with people, making people really comfortable, and trying to understand what they were trying to do with their business.”

4:15 “Though I didn’t finish college, I was trained in science, and I’ve always had a real interest in science/biology especially.”

5:30 Gansky tells about GNN, the first commercial website. – “I started to see the internet when it was in its most extreme infancy.”

7:00 [On the birth of the internet] – “There were all sorts of media types – video, audio. There were all sorts of people with crazy ideas and applications that this could appeal to.”

7:37 [On selling GNN to AOL] – “It was just being around really great people, at the right time.”

8:05 How the tech industry’s culture of collaboration fostered the rise of the major internet companies.

9:33 [On photography in the pre-kodak era] – “I just really loved taking pictures, but I really hated the business of being in the distribution business – printing and writing little notes and going to the post office and doing all that.”

11:02 [On the reaction shift from film to digital] – “It became really clear to us how rapidly this shift was taking place, and we started to build out what was the first photo sharing and printing service, which got bought 2 years later by Kodak.”

11:45 How Gansky’s team developed oFoto and generated $60M in revenue. – “I look at oFoto as kind of the first social network that connected eCommerce.”

14:30 [On selling oFoto to Kodak] – “Once I lost control of the brand, it was going to be very challenging to keep the service as it was.”

15:35 Gansky explains what her team goes through now to vigorously test new ideas. “If it goes through this process and survives, then we go and get this thing funded.”

17:28 “What often happens is that new of our working on something leaks out and investors are in a conversation even before we’re ready to talk.”

18:30 The role of “meshy” collaboration.

18:52 [On how Mesh came about] – “There were two things that brought it together for me. One was that there was this idea that we raise $60M to do oFoto, and I looked around in 2008 and thought: ‘If I were going to start oFoto today,’ I asked myself the question, ‘what would I need to do it?’”

20:00 “The entry point of being an entrepreneur is so low right now, you can create a little idea or a product and get it to market in all sorts of ways.”

21:12 “All ventures should be social, if we aren’t making the customers’ we’re targeting lives better, then it’s not a sustainable business.”

22:34 “Cities are places where there’s lots of people and less space.”

24:36 How SaaS has changed the game. “It’s available as a buy the drink business model, as opposed to having to own the whole thing.”

24:58 [On the new business model] – “We don’t have to own things but we can access what we want, when we want it, and pay for just what we use is gaining traction.”

25:36 “Last century was a century of ownership, and we’re moving to a world in which access to goods, services, and talent triumphs over ownership.”

26:02 “Unused value = waste.”

27:50 How co-working spaces help Gansky work while on the road.

29:02 “If I’m really wanting to not be disturbed, I sit on a plane or go home and work…Being in a co-working space is a really vital, really exciting environment. I really enjoy it. It’s social when you want it to be, but it has a little bit of everything.”

31:07 “You bring the part that you’re great at to people who are looking for your part of the puzzle.”

33:21 Types of car services capitalizing on the idea of unused value = waste.

35:19 [On Gansky’s database] – “Each author or each artist can determine how they want their work distributed.”

35:58 [On how Gansky stays focused and productive] – “I start my day and end my day by going outside, because it if I didn’t force myself to do that…then I would get sucked in, and it still happens.”

36:33 The enjoyment of unnecessary travel. “It’s allows me to get out of my own head and observe people, and listen to conversations.”

38:19 “I think it’s really helpful to not take things so seriously.”

Expert Bio

Lisa Gansky is, at heart, a marketect and “impact junky” with a strong interest in breaking the edges of formerly happy business models and bringing together not-so-likely characters in the form of new offerings, teams and partnerships. She is the author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.

As CEO, co-founder and chairman of Ofoto, Lisa drew on her entrepreneurial spirit and experience developing global web services. Lisa and the team worked to develop Ofoto into a world-class consumer services offering which she left once Kodak Gallery reached over 45M customers in 2005. In addition to her roles at Ofoto and Eastman Kodak, she was a Co-founder and CEO of GNN, the first commercial website, acquired by AOL in 1995, where she then directed Internet Services for AOL through 1997.

Lisa has been an investor and board member of more than twenty internet and mobile services companies. Currently, she serves as an advisor and investor in New Resource Bank, Vayable, Loosecubes, TaskRabbit, RelayRides, Scoot Networks, Squidoo, Greenbiz, Pixelpipe, Mingoville, and Honest Buildings.

For more information, visit Lisa’s website.

Contact Info for Lisa Gansky

Web address: LisaGansky.com

Web address: Meshing.it

Travels From: San Francisco, CA

Follow Lisa:

Books by Lisa Gansky

Linked Strategies – Featured Interview with Nate Kievman

Founder and CEO of Linked Strategies

Wichita, KS

Listen to this interview to learn:

Some of the standards you must clear to be considered a thought leader
The power of saying “no” to opportunities and how it helps you grow your business
What “platform maturity” allows you as an expert to do to serve even a larger customer base
How to convey trust, authority, and credibility using your LinkedIn profile
Emerging trends with LinkedIn that will allow businesses to build a larger platform in even less time than before

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:02 Kievman tells about his transition from a degree in Sports Administration to being a LinkedIn platform leader.

3:11 “What I found was that LinkedIn was my premiere tool for helping these little startups build their advisory boards.”

3:52 How his work consulting small startups led to the creation of his book.

4:17 “LinkedIn is purely a business tool.”

4:28 “I saw a big opportunity and said, ‘You know, no one is really owning this. There’s an opportunity here to be a thought leader in a fast growing market.”

5:10 “I’m a true believer that to be a thought leader you have to demonstrate success. You have to be able to come from a premise of authority.”

6:25 How Kievman used an interview series to establish himself as a thought leader.

6:57 “I think the premiere thing is having demonstrable results and then sharing those, and people resonated with those so that they could use them and apply them immediately, and get results.”

7:50 [On claiming expert status] – “Base it on credibility of results and talk about those results and then people will flock to you.”

8:39 “My biggest challenge actually has been, not so much in the marketing or lead generation, it’s actually been scalability…being able to take on all of the inquiries.”

9:35 “Most experts have a book, most experts have some kind of automated product, but they really live on their training and consulting.”

10:35 “It’s understanding a balance between lifestyle, scalability, and then optimizing our own revenue channels.”

11:41 “So at any one time I could have 10 or 15 projects running and instead of being able to focus 100% exclusively on fixing my business and making sure I can make it a really optimized process.”

13:27 “I put my intention in what I did actually want to experience which was scalability and since then I have already taken on a partner who’s built a $44M company.”

14:53 “There’s a very simple process for generating business on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, like any other platform, has to start off with two pieces, and if you’re not generating business from it, you’re probably missing one or both of these pieces. The pieces are not what you do, not tasks that you do, but actually positioning plays.”

15:20 “So if you don’t have trust and credibility, it doesn’t matter what you communicate or to whom you community to, your response rates are going to be extremely low.”

15:38 “Anyone can establish trust and credibility, you just have to look deep.”

16:10 “Your profile has to be able to portray that trust and credibility, and your copy needs to reaffirm your authority.”

16:51 “There’s authority in numbers. If you can quantify anything you’ve done, quantify it.”

17:00 “You’re not looking to close the deal on an e-mail or an in-mail within LinkedIn, you’re looking to generate a conversation and then it’s kinda gonna be up to you to close the business.”

17:15 “LinkedIn is a tool that can generate the right conversations with the right people at the right time.”

17:25 “The business happens in the In-Mail.”

17:40 How owning a LinkedIn group can establish you as a subject authority.

18:55 The story of how Tom Circe generated $118,000 in speaker fees just by using LinkedIn.

20:58 “There’s such a value in personal face to face connection time.”

21:37 “If you don’t create your virtual stage for yourself, then getting on a real stage is going to be really hard.”

23:01 Tips for creating a virtual stage for yourself.

23:17 “[LinkedIn] has a challenge, which is, they have a disconnect between their membership, the needs of you and I, and their profit.”

22:57 The evolution of LinkedIn company pages, and what users can do to get ahead of the curve.

25:40 The importance of avoiding SPAM in groups.

26:00 “My hope is that LinkedIn will embrace the midsize and small businesses more effectively.”

27:40 [Platform maturity] – “The companies or individuals that are at the right place at the right time at a platform’s maturity are going to be the bestowed thought leaders in that space.”

29:49 “Most people don’t know that LinkedIn’s a huge database.”

Expert Bio

Nathan Kievman is the Founder and CEO of Linked Strategies and creates cutting-edge business solutions maximizing all of the power of social media platforms. Considered one of the leading authorities on social media and LinkedIn, Nathan has a robust following as the owner of the number one LinkedIn Strategies Group on LinkedIn. He has taught more than 35,000 people how to master the platform.

Nathan is the executive editor of LI & Business, now with more than 14.5 million subscribers. He has authored three books on the topic, including the currently available LinkedIn Mastery: An All Inclusive Guide to Mastering LinkedIn. Nathan presented as the keynote speaker on Social Media Strategy for the National Speakers Association winter meetings in 2011.

For more information, visit Nathan’s website.

Contact Info for Nathan Kievman

Business Phone: 800-946-7804 or 316-942-1111

Web address: LinkedStrategies.com

Travels From: Wichita, KS

Connect with Nathan:

Zing Your Brand – Interview with Mary van de Wiel

Brand Anthropologist and CEO

New York, NY

Listen to this interview to learn:

How a brand anthropologist operates.
How to use the question “Why do you do what you do?” to uncover important core answers.
What makes people “lean into” a web site when it is well-executed.
The missed opportunity of not thinking you’re a brand if you’re “less than Nike.”

Expert Bio

As Brand Anthropologist and CEO of Zing Your Brand, a NYC-based branding consultancy, laboratory and workspace for serious play, Mary van de Wiel [alias: Van] works with solopreneurs and corporate clients alike, pumping oxygen into suffocating brands to yield heightened marketplace visibility and unprecedented profits. Van is best known for her idiosyncratic views on the emotional clues that beckon online audiences to lean into their screens, hearts beating and eyes gleaming — or run away, screaming.

As a writer, producer & radio host, Van brings her fiercely individualistic perspective to NY Brand Lab Radio, as well as to her off-air training & networking portals, The NY Brand Lab and The Brand Reinvention Summit. She’s currently putting the finishing touches on her forthcoming book, Dead Brand Walking: A Brand Therapist’s Viewpoint.

In a former life, Van was the Founder, CEO and Executive Creative Director of an award-winning independent branding & design shop with offices in New York and Sydney. She’s led global brand campaigns for the launch of People Weekly magazine in Australia, the Macau International Airport in China, and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and has served as a business-building muse for Conde Nast Magazines, American Airlines, Sony, Sydney Opera House, Time Inc., News Corporation and The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.

For more information, visit Van’s website.

Contact Info for Mary van de Wiel

Business Phone: 718-909-1140

Web address: ZingYourBrand.com

Travels From: New York, NY

Follow Van:

Idea Haus – Interview with Kevin Popovic

Founder and Communications Director, Ideahaus

Del Mar, CA

Listen to this interview to learn:

The evolution of a business based on fitting a passion and skillset into an eager marketplace through video and event production.
Secrets behind the vital sequence of developing the strategy, plan, executing, and then measuring the results.
Insights behind the scenes with satellite marketing.
How Kevin leveraged his video interviews to build a powerful brand and bottom line success for his clients.

Expert Bio

Kevin Popović founded Ideahaus in 1990 to help clients figure out what to say and how to say it to their target markets while building truly remarkable brands. As Communications Director for the award-winning company, he develops creative strategies and communications plans, including schedules, budgets and metrics for everything a company uses to communicate.

Kevin developed the trade name “Satellite Marketing” to describe a communications strategy designed to connect an organization with its target markets via social media sites and services. Satellites are used in addition to, or in place of, traditional media, such as print, radio, television, and direct mail. This technique is the subject of his forthcoming book, Satellite Marketing: Using Social Media for Business.

For more information, visit Kevin’s website.

Contact Info for Kevin Popović

Business Phone: 866-773-0441

Web address: Ideahaus.com

Travels From: San Diego, CA

Follow Kevin:

The Simple Elegance of Shibumi: Featured Interview with Matthew May

Founder, Shibumi Creative Works; Innovation Consultant; Speaker; Bestselling Author

Matthew May talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about creative marketing and the importance of embracing Shibumi in your business.

Listen to this interview to learn:

How Matt’s career took off with the publication of his book.
How the refinement of a loom design factors into Toyota’s heritage and culture.
What shibumi means for business leaders.
How to combat crippling complexity in organizations.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:12 How Matthew got started in his career as a speaker, author, and coach.

1:27 May tells about how a three day coaching gig with Toyota turned into an 8 year stint, and launched his coaching career and to the publication his first book, The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation

3:18 “My entire world was sort of trying to help [Toyota] create and launch Toyota University, and I found myself up against a brick wall there halfway through my time.”

3:52 [On the story of Sakichi Toyoda] – “He spent the entirety of his adult career developing not an automobile, but an automatic loom for spinning and weaving. His entire quest was to have a loom that would stop working whenever a single thread broke.”

4:57 “It’s not about doing, it’s about stop doing.”

5:28 [On Shibumi] – “It’s this sort of effortless elegance, this elegant simplicity,– the ability to achieve the maximum effect with the minimum means.”

6:08 “As I look around me I see a crippling complexity, excessive waste, whether it’s in a product or whether it’s in government, whether it’s in policy, no matter what it is, there just seems to be too much of everything.”

6:39 “I approach companies and teams about finding elegant solutions, generally by looking at a problem and looking at it from a consumer’s point of view or a user’s point of view.”

8:05 “About 10 years ago Toyota failed miserably trying to market the Toyota brand to new millennials…it was a car that Mom and Dad drove.”

8:38 “They realized they needed a new product, a new brand to appeal to this upcoming generation…but they quickly learned that they didn’t understand that generation.”

9:29 How Toyota’s “field agents” were able to infiltrate the younger customer base and create the XB, a customizable model that couldn’t stay in dealer lots.

10:11 “The kids picked it up, spent another 15 grand outfitting it…It was nothing about the car, it was everything to do with what you could do to the car.”

12:05 [On training salespeople on selling this new kind of car] – “There was a number of dimensions that came to light in terms of how to talk to this new population. Gen Y’ers, new Millennials do not like advertising.”

14:45 “We are not used to doing what designers do, which is to get out of our cubicles and offices and walk a mile in the shoes of our customer.”

15:53 “I think a lot of times organizations aren’t exactly sure how to pull creativity and innovation from their employee base.”

16:22 Why suggestion boxes are really complaint boxes.

17:02 “People don’t want to change unless it’s their idea.”

17:20 “When the direction of flow of information and attention is reversed, where someone is coming to you saying ‘I don’t know how to do this. I want to change certain things, how do I do it?”

18:12 How change begins with a pocket of interest.

18:26 [On creating a space for shared ownership] – “It’s a pull, rather than a push. I think when you’re trying to push something through an organization…even though they might not say it, if it’s your idea, then it will always be your idea. The trick is to A) find folks who are interested in the first place or B) if they’re not, and a higher level executive is telling a middle level manager that they need to do this, the trick is to make it their idea.”

20:47 Where May gets his regular inspiration for writing his columns, and how he is able to curate those ideas for a broader audience.

22:30 [On the significance of curation] – “In the name of excess, we’re overwhelmed by knowledge. One way that I can add value to the world and this business conversation is to help others in a radar screen or filter kind of fashion, looking for things.”

23:58 “The new exciting world of social media is allowing people to go beyond the good old job description and be able to add insight and value in new and exciting ways.”

25:11 “People are starting to work more like artists and scientists did and do. They’re trying to focus on a question that’s important to them in the confines of their work, use the resource constraints that are being imposed on them, because we all are facing them right now, and use them as a creative challenge.”

26:20 “I think people are more resourceful, more ingenious, and ready to ply their ingenuity.”

Expert Bio

Matthew E. May is an internationally recognized author, speaker and coach on creativity, innovation and design strategy. In 2011, he launched Shibumi Creative Works, an innovation consultancy dedicated to improving human creative capital in business, work and life.

A popular speaker and confidential adviser, Matt lectures each year to corporations, governments, and universities around the world, as well as facilitates creative teams and coaches senior leaders in companies of all sizes. He spent nearly a decade as a close adviser to Toyota and is a master kaizen coach. His articles have appeared in national publications such as USAToday, Design Mind, and MIT/Sloan Management Review. He has been featured and quoted in The Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker , and on National Public Radio.

Matt is the author of three bestselling, award-winning books: The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change; In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, named to the BusinessWeek 2009 Best Business Books list in the Design/Innovation category; and The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation, which won the Shingo Research Prize for Excellence and was selected as one of 800CEORead’s “Best Business Books of 2006.”

For more information, visit Matt’s website.

Contact Info for Matthew E. May

Business Phone: 805-230-2908

Web address: MatthewEMay.com

Travels From: Los Angeles, CA

Follow Matthew:

Books by Matthew E. May

Resources Mentioned

Richard Florida – the Rise of the Creative Class

Making Ideas Happen – Featured Interview with Scott Belsky

Founder and CEO of Behance and Bestselling Author

New York, NY

Listen to this interview to learn:

How Scott’s book, Making Things Happen, helps his company reach and engage new audiences.
How to create a live event program with a waiting list of hundreds of creative professionals.
How Scott busted the top 5 myths about how to make creative ideas really happen.
What creative people need to make their ideas happen.
Why it’s important to optimize your best skills.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:22 “Behance started from this obsession of mine which was helping organize and get the creative world in order a little bit. I just was very frustrated by the fact that so many creative people and teams that I knew who were writing screenplays, working on books, thinking of business they wanted to start. They would talk about what they wanted to do, and they would talk about it again, and then talk about it again…”

2:06 How Belsky formulated his plan for creating Behance.

2:28 “I realized there was room for a business with a mission to organize the creative world.”

3:05 “Once you have an idea and you’re thinking ‘Now what?’ That’s really where I’m interested.”

3:50 Belsky tells about the 99% conference and its purpose in helping creative people execute ideas.

4:30 [Measuring the effectiveness of the 99% conference] – “Each conference we ask people to write down ideas that they’re really hoping to complete, and then we follow up a year later and hold them accountable and ask them their progress.”

5:38 “There’s a shared need that people have to be accountable to their ideas and to work on the execution.”

6:01 “The biggest myth is that ideas happen because they’re great or by accident. People think that the better the idea is the more chance of it coming to market. But we know that there’s no such correlation.”

6:30 Ideas come into being because they are executed, not always because they are great.

6:40 [On organization] – “How do you manage your energy on a daily basis? Do you run too many meetings? What do you do in your meetings to make sure that they’re actionable.”

7:12 “When something that you are trying to do is working out for you, you focus on things that need to be fixed rather than optimizing things that are working. The most effective creative leaders in the world are constantly optimizing the way that they work and the way that they do things, because that’s really what they recognize as their competitive advantage.”

8:14 The story of a LA designer and how Behance accelerated his career.

9:27 How Belsky has used the platform to develop and showcase his own work.

9:36 “We built the Behance network as a platform to showcase and discover creative work. And we think it doesn’t only appeal to the people who create the work, but also the people who want to discover it.”

10:10 “The book has just been an incredible way to open the doors to large organizations who may find some of our technology too forward thinking, may not be really ready for some of the things we’re trying to do in the creative industry, but all share the desire to help their creative people who they currently employ execute more effectively.”

11:18 Why it’s a bit unnerving to have your thoughts in print.

11:30 “As an entrepreneur who’s trying to change the mindset of an industry, it’s very helpful to have the credibility that comes along with writing and being able to speak about what you write about in front of tens of thousands of people.”

11:58 Belsky describes the ups and downs of a writing process.

13:30 “The book has been a great calling card for our business to reach out to all different types of people and build credibility, and to engage new sorts of customers. And most importantly, it’s about our message.

13:50 “We wanted to be a media agnostic business. While most companies say they’re a technology company or a paper company or a consulting company or a conference company, we didn’t want to be about our medium, we wanted to be about our mission, which was to help empower and organize creative people to make ideas happen.”

14:45 “I have an incredible team of people, [I had] no real expertise in the areas of design or technology prior to starting this 5 years ago. And the people that I surround myself with every day now are the people who taught me everything I know.”

15:42 “I think deciding which things to do first – prioritization is always a real challenge in a business like ours with so many creative people and so many things we want to do.”

16:16 “I think in the technology business there’s no idle moment. Everything is changing at light speed around you, and you just have to really try to keep up.”

17:09 “Twitter is a great way of following curators.”

Expert Bio

Scott Belsky believes that the greatest breakthroughs across all industries are a result of creative people and teams that are especially productive, and has therefore committed his professional life to helping organize creative individuals, teams, and networks.

Scott is the founder and CEO of Behance, a company that develops products and services for creative industries. These include The 99%, Behance’s think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world; Action Method, a popular online/mobile productivity application and line of organizational paper products; and the Creative’s Outfitter, which distributes a selection of products that help organize creative people and teams.

Through his work at Behance, Scott has become an advocate for technology and community initiatives that empower the careers of creative professionals and help businesses leverage the creative potential of their people. He has worked with leading media and Fortune 500 companies, including GE and Hewlett-Packard. He has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek, and has shared Behance’s research in segments on ABC News, MSNBC, and with the United States State Department and CIA. Scott has also guest lectured at Cornell University, Harvard University, VCU Brand Center, and UC Berkeley among other institutions, and serves as a small business expert on American Express’ Open Forum website. In 2010, Scott was included in Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” list.

Scott is also the author of the best-selling book Making Ideas Happen.

For more information, visit Scott’s website.

Contact Info for Scott Belsky

Behance Web Address: Behance.com

Scott’s Web Address: ScottBelsky.com

Travels From: New York, NY

Follow Scott:

Books by Scott Belsky

Resources Mentioned

The Shifting Marketplace – Featured Interview with Scott Klososky

Author, Social Technology Expert, and Founder of Alkami Technology

Scott Koslosky talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about changing marketplace technology and how to know when you’re ready to expand your business.

Listen to this interview to learn:

How a dyslexic boss showed how to find a willing market and build a business from the ground up
What it took to sell to larger companies as a startup
Mistakes made and lessons learned from overly ambitious business expansion
What CEOs need to know now about leadership skills in the age of digital marketing and social media

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:05 Scott discusses how he got his start in business with a start-up that he joined at 18.

2:13 Scott describes how he worked his way up this company straight out of high school, then began his own business.

6:19 “The first things I learned right off the bat were how much accountability there was when you’re the one who now owns [the company]. There’s no one really that’s going to come to your rescue. You have to make all the decisions.”

7:08 It took four months to get his company to stability.

8:04 Scott realized he was no longer in “start-up mode” when his company picked up big orders from large companies, as well as when they opened new stores.

9:03 However, he does admit that his naivety caused his company to grow too fast, and later had to file for bankruptcy.

9:54 Scott talks about the problems faced by young entrepreneurs.

11:50 “You have to be good at looking forward into the future.”

13:15 Scott always recommends that a company gets a two-year lead on the competition with how they use technology.

13:41 There are two areas to think about when trying to grow one’s technology use in the business: back of house and digital marketing.

18:12 Scott wrote his book “The Velocity Manifesto” because he was working with so many leaders who didn’t understand the difference that technology makes in the marketplace, and they needed to cultivate new skills regarding technology strategies.

23:01 Every company should be able to access all customer information in one platform.

23:30 Digital marketing engines are also a necessary technology to keep up with their competitors.

24:35 Some indicators of sustainability that Scott always looks out for in his company are profitability and profit growth, as well as how well the company is helping clients succeed.

29:00 The customization of how people market to specific businesses and demographics will continue to change.

30:43 Every day, Scott digests as much information as he can so that he can be more valuable in the marketplace and a more effective leader.

32:06 “The marketplace is changing, and technology is driving that change.”

Expert Bio

Scott Klososky, a former CEO of three successful startup companies, currently serves as founder and Chairman of the Board of Alkami Technology, which focuses on providing online account management solutions to the financial services industry. Scott also works with senior executives in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 corporations to universities and nonprofits, including Cisco, Ebay, Volvo, and the American Payroll Association. He helps his clients integrate social technologies into their strategic direction as well as improve their utilization of technology as a tool.

Scott is the author of three books: The Velocity Manifesto: Harnessing Technology, Vision and Culture to Future Proof Your Organization, Enterprise Social Technologies: Helping Organizations Harness the Power of Social Media, Social Networking, Social Relevancy, and Managing with Social Technology, a McGraw Hill Brief Case Series Book that is targeted specifically at giving managers a roadmap for implementing and using social tools in order to improve productivity and results.

For more information, visit Scott’s website.

Contact Info for Scott Klososky

Business Phone: 405-359-3910

Web address: http://www.fpov.com/scott-speaks/

Travels From: Detroit, MI

Follow Scott:

Books by Scott Klososky

The Cult of the Amateur – Interview with Andrew Keen

Internationally Recognized Entrepreneur, Speaker and Author

Santa Rosa, CA

Listen to this interview to learn:

The inside story on audiocafe.com, an early Silicon Valley Internet start-up.
The single most important key to a start-up succeeding.
How the market will tell you the brutal truth about your company or idea, and why it’s best to learn it sooner rather than later.
What’s lost through participation in Internet communitites in terms of human relationships.

Expert Bio

Andrew Keen, is an entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How the Internet is Killing our Culture, which was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year Award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company.

He is currently the host of the “Keen On” show on TechCrunch TV, where he interviews leading opinion makers from the worlds of technology, media and policy. Andrew is also an acclaimed speaker on the international circuit, speaking regularly on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society. Andrew’s new book about the social media revolution, Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto, is coming out in 2012.

For more information, visit Andrew’s website.

Contact Info for Andrew Keen

Web address: AJKeen.com

Travels From: San Francisco, CA

Follow Andrew:

Books by Andrew Keen

Creativity is for Everyone – Featured Interview with Lisa Bodell

Founder and CEO of futurethink

Lisa Bodell talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about creativity, positive thinking, and spring cleaning.

Listen to this interview to learn:

The reality behind how innovation occurs in business.
What makes leadership harder than it has to be for some.
The importance of mindset in approaching solutions.
How you can unlock creative energy in your company by killing stupid rules.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

1:37 Lisa’s days in advertising showed her that she was creative in a strategic way, leading her to create innovative businesses.

2:53 “I thought that everybody could be creative and innovative, they just needed to be able to flex it in different ways.”

4:40 A big misunderstanding in business and innovation is that only artists are creative, and Lisa wants to make sure people understand that every person at every level can be creative and innovative.

6:11 “It’s often the folks that are stereotyped as least innovative, that want to be innovative the most.”

8:20 Lisa observes that one of the biggest obstacles to fostering creativity is skepticism, and that business leaders need to break down their propensity to immediately be skeptical of new ideas.

9:10 “Skepticism definitely does [have a place in the creative process]. But what we’re talking about is a balance with potential. What we’ve groomed today are professional skeptics, and when that’s all you do, you don’t give ideas that have potential a fair hearing, and you might miss out on big opportunities.”

12:10 Lisa estimates that 80% of companies around the world are committing a grave mistake: having a complacent culture, where employees are resigned to the status quo and to not make waves.

13:25 There is a diagnostic in Lisa’s book “Kill the Company” where an employee can see how complacent they are, and she outlines three things one must do to no longer be complacent: diagnose oneself, figure out which behaviors one wants to change, and then figure out what small things one can empower others to do to contribute to an overall cultural change.

15:00 Lisa is careful to point out that these changes should be implemented from the middle out. In other words, it is not effective to have upper leadership telling people what to do, instead empowerment should come from the people at the center.

16:01 Lisa implements something she calls ‘Little-Bigs’ in which a company can see the biggest overall change by doing little, every day changes. She gives two examples that have been effective for her clients.

17:30 One of the most effective exercises Lisa has used with executives is having them imagine they were trying to kill their own company as a competitor would, which helped them identify the things which were weak or not working, enabling them to root out the bad to make room for more prosperity.

21:03 Lisa makes sure her own company implements these practices she teaches, and does a lot of ‘spring cleaning.’

Expert Bio

Lisa Bodell is the founder and CEO of futurethink, an internationally recognized innovation research and training firm that helps businesses embrace change and become world-class innovators. She founded futurethink on the premise that everyone has the power to innovate — they just need to know how. Clients such as 3M, GE, and Johnson & Johnson look to futurethink to develop new styles of thinking and generate innovative ideas.

Lisa is globally recognized as a leader and pioneer in the field of futuring and innovation — creating a unique, straightforward approach to an otherwise complicated topic. She created the widely adopted SIPC Innovation Framework (STRATEGY, IDEAS, PROCESS, CLIMATE), which has helped innovators around the world easily embrace innovation, providing a clear method that breaks innovation down into manageable parts.

In addition to running futurethink and lecturing, Lisa currently serves as an advisor on the boards of the Institute of Direct Marketing in London, The Women’s Congress, the Association of Professional Futurists, and the prestigious Institute for Triple Helix Innovation think tank, the only innovation initiative of its kind within the U.S. government. She also serves as a finalist judge at the annual Idea Crossing Innovation Challenge and FIT’s innovation challenge (which futurethink co-created), has taught courses on marketing and creativity at American University, and serves as a faculty member of the American Management Association.

She is the author of Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution and an author of Success Simplified, a collection of works featuring other chapters by Dr. Stephen Covey, Dr. Tony Alessandra, and Patricia Fripp. Lisa has appeared on FOX News, and in publications such as Crain’s, Business Week, The New York Times, WIRED, Investor’s Business Daily, Successful Meetings, Harvard Business Review, and The Futurist.

For more information, visit Lisa’s website.

Contact Info for Lisa Bodell

Business Phone: 646-257-5737

Web address: futurethink.com

Travels From: San Francisco, CA

Follow Lisa:

Books by Lisa Bodell

The On Demand Brand – Interview with Rick Mathieson

Award-Winning Brand Marketer, Author, and Creative Strategist

San Francisco, CA

Listen to this interview to learn:

How Rick reached Tom Peters and formed the basis of a professional mentorship and friendship.
What the sustaining energy is that keeps people engaged and “in the conversation” both online and off line.
Contrasting examples of a company that bombed with their online effort and several that hit home runs.
The law of transparency online that allows even the smallest pizza shop to use these largely no-charge tools to build a fan base.

Expert Bio

Rick Mathieson is an award-winning writer, author and creative strategist. A veteran of the advertising industry, Rick is the vice president and creative director for a prominent advertising agency, as well as a strategic advisor on digital marketing initiatives. Over the course of his career, Rick has been recognized with over one hundred regional, national and international creative awards for work produced for a veritable “Who’s Who” of global brand names, including HP, T-Mobile, Disney, and Ferrari Club of America.

Rick’s book Branding Unbound has ranked as the world’s #1 best-selling book on mobile marketing. His new book, The On-Demand Brand, was a #1 Amazon “Hot New Release,” and has ranked among Amazon’s Top 10 books on advertising. Spanning social media, branded entertainment, mobile marketing and more, the book has been described as “required reading for the digital age” for its strategic approach to delivering blockbuster brand experiences through digital innovation.

Rick’s insights on postmodern marketing have been featured in many media outlets, including Wired, Forbes, MSNBC, and NPR. He is also a frequently featured speaker at industry events, such as The iMedia Breakthrough Summit, Digital Hollywood, The Global Retail Executive Council, The Microsoft Leadership Forum, Yahoo’s “Branducation” lecture series, and the AMA’s “Corporate Branding” series, among many others.

For more information, visit Rick’s website.

Contact Info for Rick Mathieson

Web Address: RickMathieson.com

Rick’s Blog: GenWow

Travels From: San Francisco, CA

Follow Rick:

Books by Rick Mathieson

Successful Blog – Interview with Liz Strauss

Brand Strategist, Community Builder, and Leadership Trainer

Chicago, IL

Listen to this interview to learn:

How blog writing on the Internet is like “Little House on the Prairie”.
Why “location, location, location” matters on the Internet, but it’s not where you live or work.
Valuable tools to use to boost your blog and Twitter visibility on the Internet.
The importance of speaking the language that your target market is using.
The secret of using “co-opetition” to exchange insights with peer experts.
How focusing on a niche helps raise your reputation faster.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

Liz Strauss Show Notes

1:04 “SOBcon is a closed, as in very small, workshop event in which people who do business online and offline meet together to discuss strategies for being successful in doing their business.”

1:50 “I have 35 years in instructional design and educational publishing, and over the course of that time I eventually grew to a place where there were like 3 jobs left, and I didn’t want any of them, and believe me, they didn’t want me either.”

2:14 How Strauss began her career in publishing and how she built her network “outside the publishing box.”

3:40 “The learning curve goes way up when you start doing things online.”

4:21 [On going digital in 2005] – “I did it a time when there were only 12M blogs, and now there are more than 100M blogs.”

5:10 “A few years ago when there were only 12M blogs people came online pretty much one at a time, and they came online – I think of it as Little House on the Prairie – because they wanted to be there and they wanted to see what it was like.”

6:03 The Executive washroom of the world.

6:13 [On the advent of Twitter] – “I think of that as when the trains came, and the city people started moving online. And we weren’t living in long cabins anymore, and people started building general stores and main streets and downtowns and there are more things to do and more things to keep us busy.”

7:12 “As opposed to being a person who comes in and learns the tools and uses them, corporation comes with its own culture, so it picks up the tools and tries to bring them back and use them in the way that they’ve always used them before.”

8:57 “What often happens is that people will come to me and say, ‘I need a blog because I have a business.’ And I’ll say, ‘Why?’ And they’ll say, ‘Because that’s what I’m supposed to have.” And I’ll say, “Maybe not.”

9:12 The story of Strauss’s father the saloon owner.

9:45 “I use my blog as my sort of office. I have 4,300 blog posts so it’s like my 4300 page resume.”

10:17 [On having a blog] – “It’s a good way of building trust relationships with people that are potential customers.

10:25 “I use my blog to go deep and let people know who I really am.”

10:54 “I use Twitter to go wide, to make sure that people know that I’m out here and that I exist.”

12:15 “But it’s having a strategy around those things which is definitely built around where the people I want to reach are.”

12:34 “Pre-internet, everything was about location, location, location.”

14:47 How to choose platforms where your audience hangs out to have a greater chance of success with your business.

15:50 “The more you narrow your niche, the more you widen your opportunity.”

17:45 Using google alerts to find the right location for you to set up shop on the internet.

18:21 [In using keywords] – “One of the keys is understanding not what you want to sell them, but what they are searching for.”

20:24 How you can ask the right questions of established experts in your chosen field to help position yourself for success.

21:42 “People try and serve too many people at once.”

22:24 Why you shouldn’t turn your back on your original skill sets, and how all of your skills can give you credibility.

Expert Bio

Liz Strauss is the CEO and founder of SOBCon, a highly successful business bloggers conference. She is also the author of the popular Successful-Blog.com, as well as a speaker who works to help businesses become irresistible to their prospects and customers.

In 2011, Liz was named “Titan of Web 2.0,” a prestigious award presented at World Forum in Davos, Switzerland. She has also been named in the “Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers” list, the “Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2008,” and the “50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women of Social Media.”

For more information, visit Liz’s website or Successful-Blog.com.

Contact Info for Liz Strauss

Business Phone: 773-619-0371

Web address: LizStrauss.com

Web address: Successful-Blog.com

Travels From: Chicago, IL

Follow Liz:

Attention! – Interview with Jim Kukral

Web Business Consultant, Speaker, and Bestselling Author

Cleveland, OH

Listen to this interview to learn:

The top mistakes business owners and executives make when using social media for business, and how to avoid them.
The many ways that a business leader can use social media to position the business.
Why it is critical to build a “platform” for communicating with social media and how to get started.
How to use precise demographic targeting to reach the buyers most likely to appreciate your offers.

Expert Bio

Jim Kukral is an internet expert who helps entrepreneurs, small business owners, and large companies like FedEx and Sherwin Williams learn how to find success online. His passion for teaching shines through in his training and coaching programs, and as a professional speaker Jim has presented to thousands of people across America on the topics of Web-entrepreneurism, success and failure, Internet marketing and more.

As a serial Web-entrepreneur himself, Jim has consistently innovated many online businesses, including Prfessor.com, a web-based solution that allows anyone to instantly create their own online university or training center. His latest venture focuses on bringing the power of self-publishing to the masses. You can learn more about this at Digital Book Launch and Content Every Day.

Jim was recently named as one of “The Most Influential Small Business People on Twitter” according to Dun & Bradstreet. He is the author of Attention! This Book Will Make You Money and The Ultimate Pitch, and serves as a Program Faculty Member for the University of San Francisco’s Internet Marketing Program where he teaches classes to students around the globe on the topics of Internet marketing, Web monetization and social media.

For more information, visit Jim’s website.

Contact Info for Jim Kukral

Web address: JimKukral.com

Travels From: Cleveland, OH

Follow Jim:

Books by Jim Kukral

The Responsible Business – Interview with Carol Sanford

Author, Speaker, and Consultant

Seattle, WA

Listen to this interview to learn:

How an early mentor introduced Carol to people, organizations, and systems that have nurtured a 30-year work plan.
The most important thing for a company that is embracing sustainability to keep in mind.
A reality about different ends of the organizational hierarchy that all businesses should understand.
What Internet transparancy is doing to shape how leaders communicate.

Expert Bio

Carol Sanford is on a mission to create a better world, and she believes that business can and will play a major role in accomplishing that. Central to Carol’s philosophy and approach is a fresh look at what makes an organization truly responsible. To that end, she has been leading major consulting change efforts in both Fortune 500 and new-economy businesses for more than 30 years. Her client list includes long-term relationships with Colgate and DuPont. She also works with new-economy companies like Intel, Agilent and leaders of corporate responsibility such as Seventh Generation.

Carol has published dozens of works in ten languages, including a series of articles in Executive Excellence, Stephen Covey’s newsletter, and At Work, a Berrett-Koehler Journal. She is the author of The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success.

Carol is also a judge and mentor for University of Washington Global Business Center Social Entrepreneur Competition, Seattle.

For more information, visit Carol’s website.

Contact Info for Carol Sanford

Web address: CarolSanford.com

Travels From: Seattle, WA

Follow Carol:

Books by Carol Sanford

How to Click with People – Interview with Dr. Rick Kirschner

Founder, The Art of Change, LLC

Ashland, Oregon

Listen to this interview to learn:

How following your passion opens doors to new opportunities.
What Congress can learn about working productively with people with whom you strongly disagree on issues.
A three-step process for helping people and organizations change.
The risks of social media technology for young people today.

Expert Bio

As a motivational speaker, communication skills trainer, and founder of The Art of Change, LLC, Dr. Rick Kirschner seeks to help his audience find the personal motivation and learn the needed skills to do the important work today for creating a better tomorrow. He offers The Art of Change Skills For Life™ speeches, training and coaching programs to businesses and other organizations to teach positive change, influence and persuasion, teamwork ansd leadership, and healthy living.

Before turning to speaking and coaching full time, Rick was a practitioner of Naturopathic Medicine who specialized in the treatment of stress related illness and the mind/body connection.

Since starting the second phase of his career, Rick has authored or co-author several books, including the new How To Click With People: The Secret To Better Relationships In Business And In Life and the international best-seller Dealing With People You Can’t Stand: How To Bring Out The Best In People At Their Worst. He has also created numerous award-winning CDs and audio products. His clients include everyone from Heineken to NASA to Progressive Insurance to Texas Instruments. He’s been interviewed on hundreds of radio and television programs, including CNBC, FOX and CBC and his ideas are found in newspapers and magazines including USA Today, London Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Executive Excellence.

For more information, visit Rick’s website.

Contact Info for Dr. Rick Kirschner

Business Phone: 541-488-2992

Web address: TheArtofChange.com

Travels From: Ashland, Oregon

Follow Rick:

Category Archives for "Internet and Social Media"

Social Media for Business – Featured Interview with Linda Coles

Author, Keynote Speaker, Owner of Blue Banana

Key points that you’ll learn from this interview:

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Linda Coles

Resources Mentioned by Linda Coles

Make the Most of Your Strengths – Featured Interview with Stefan Swanepoel

Internationally Bestselling Author and Motivational Speaker

Listen to this interview to learn:

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Stefan Swanepoel

Books by Stefan Swanepoel

Mastering New Media – Featured Interview with Barbara Henricks and Rusty Shelton

President & CEO of Cave Henricks Communications

CEO of Shelton Interactive, Speaker & Author

Expert Bios

Contact Info for Barbara Henricks and Rusty Shelton

Resources Mentioned by Barbara Henricks and Rusty Shelton:

Defining Data Breaches – Interview with Fred Wilf

Founder of Wilftek LLC.

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Fred Wilf

Resources Mentioned by Fred Wilf on My Quest for the Best:

9 Steps to a Better Bottom Line – Featured Interview with Dorriah Rogers

Founder of Paradyne Consulting Works

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Dorriah Rogers

Resources Mentioned by Dorriah Rogers on My Quest for the Best:

The Ridiculously High Cost of Not Listening – Featured Interview with Chuck Wall

Author and Founder of Customer CEO

Listen to this interview to learn:

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Chuck Wall

Books by Chuck Wall

Staying on the Bleeding Edge – Featured Interview with Mitch Joel

Award-winning Social Media Expert and President of Twist Image

Listen to this interview to learn:

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Mitch Joel

Books by Mitch Joel

Ubertrending – Featured Interview with Michael Tchong

Change Agent and Founder of Social Revolution

Listen to this interview to learn:

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Michael Tchong

Books by Michael Tchong

Building Great Relationships – Featured Interview with Elaine Pofeldt

Independent journalist specializing in careers and entrepreneurship

Listen to this interview to learn:

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Elaine Pofeldt

The Oracle Question – Featured Interview with Dave Logan

Co-Founder and Senior Partner of Culture Sync, Author New York, NY

Listen to this interview to learn:

Interview Insights

Click to Read the Show Notes

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Dave Logan

Books by Dave Logan

Digital Convergence Marketing – Interview with Fred Catona

Chief Marketing Strategist for Bulldozer Digital

Listen to this interview to learn:

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Fred Catona:

The Power of Unpopular – Interview with Erika Napoletano

Author, Speaker, and Brand Consultant

Listen to this interview to learn:

Expert Bio

Contact Info for Erika Napoletano

Books by Erika Napoletano

Why the Future of Business is Sharing: Featured Interview with Lisa Gansky