Marketing Roadhouse

Last month I celebrated 14 years in business, which has me a little nostalgic thinking about what has changed over the years. In a way, I have come full circle in how I run my business. I am home-based again, and I have no full-time employees any more. The one big difference from 14 years ago is that I am exactly where I want to be. I love being a small empire of one (hat

Please welcome guest blogger April Finnen from OnePersonShop. It’s happened again. Someone said, “Why don’t we start an email newsletter?” Everyone then loudly proclaimed this idea’s brilliance. Except you—the person who will make it happen. Or maybe you’re a small business owner, and it was your own idea to regularly reach out to your customers through email marketing. Done correctly, an email newsletter is, in fact, a great idea. It keeps you top-of-mind with your

I knew I wasn’t reading just another social media book when I got to page 14 and read “Likability is more of a factor than ever before.” Yes, the authors write about the tools and tactics they use, but the theme of the book is how they connect with their target audience to provide a mutually beneficial relationship. This book was a great read from cover to cover, but these are the three things that

It is not unusual for people involved in social media to manage more than one Twitter account, typically a business account and a personal one. With the proliferation of tools out there that allow us to manage multiple accounts, comes some issues. An occupational hazard for community managers is posting to the wrong account. The most recent case was Kitchen Aid during the presidential debate. Irene Koehler  has a great review of what happened and

A few months ago my good friend Jessica Hibbard ventured out on her own to start her own business, Stories and Ideas. Of course it didn’t take long for the two of us to decide we had to work together on a project. A few cups of coffee later, the Content and Community Ideashop was born. Why Ideashop and not a workshop? We want to create a day of interactive learning where you leave with

Labor day has passed and this brings the unofficial end of summer with fall sports and school starting. I know we all think of Spring Cleaning, but while we were cleaning out our garage over the weekend, I realized that Fall was a good time to re-evaluate what you are doing with your marketing and social media. If your fiscal year follows the calendar, you have 4 months until the end of the year to

I know things have been pretty quiet here at Marketing Roadhouse, and that’s for a very good reason. I have spent close to a year immersing myself in some new concepts and being more of a student than a teacher. While I am still working with clients to assist them to integrate social media into their marketing strategy, I have also been spending time researching and forming ideas and opinions around the evolution from social

In Running Lean, Ash Maurya introduces a new approach for bringing a product to market. This is not one of those theoretical books, this book gives you a clear action plan to follow step-by-step. The best news for business owners is, Maurya tells us to throw out the standard business plan and embrace the Lean Canvas. This is a one page plan that is fast to create and gives you a basis for this new

On the book’s jacket it is described as “a comprehensive risk and compliance management toolkit that walks employers step-by-step through the process of developing and implementing effective social media policy and compliance management programs that are designed to maximize – and in some cases prevent – social networking and web 2.0 risks and other electronic disasters”. I’m going to call it your go-to guide for creating any type of policy needed to protect your company