There are some people who really shine online. I could name quite a few, but I’m going to save them for another post. This post is reserved for one guy in particular – Jim Connolly, a UK-based marketing consultant. Jim is an icy ocean away, yet he has somehow managed to create a warm and friendly relationship with me – and countless others, no doubt. Jim, as they say, “gets it.” “It” is what another of my fave SM guys, Mack Collier (who probably thinks I’m stalking him by now) explains so well: “Don’t overthink social media. It’s...

The evening of September 7, 1996 was hot and muggy. I know this because it was the day after Hurricane Fran blew through Raleigh and blew out our electricity. Six trees had fallen in our yard and we had a freezer full of food that would defrost within hours, but my eight-months-pregnant self was focused on just one thing: how would I live without air conditioning? (Note: I will only entertain accusations that I’m weak and spoiled from women who have carried a 10-pound baby to term somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.) Despite my misery, I was a...

In my never-ending quest to understand this world we live in, I stumbled upon Stever Robbins’ post about the mortgage crisis. Stever makes the case that financial professionals should be held accountable for writing all those high-risk loans that are now leaving families homeless across the country. He doesn’t pull any punches in his decidedly opinionated post, and one point in particular found its mark directly in my solar plexus: "…the marketing of these mortgages was designed to persuade people to take them out. Well, it worked....

There was an interesting article about global defeat in the June issue of Psychology Today. It seems we’re hardwired to give up easily. Thousands of years of cutting our losses rather than risk death by saber-toothed tiger make us more inclined to run for cover than stay and fight. “Today, an overwhelming sense of helplessness is a blunt instrument, less necessary for survival than it once was because our options are vastly more numerous,” the article says. “Nonetheless, we still carry within us the tendency to feel easily trumped...