The other day during a consultancy session with a food industry client one of the directors asked a fairly common question that I get asked a lot. When is the best time to post things on social media? The glib answer is, “when your contacts are using the networks”. However,

How much time do you spend each day staring at a blank screen wondering what to type? Much more than you think is the answer. Years ago, “Writer’s Block” used to be the preserve of fiction authors who suddenly found their typing dried up. Unable to carry on writing they

This week I was at a conference where I was spending the day “in surgery”. The idea was that I would have a series of 15-minute appointments throughout the day. People booked an appointment with me to talk about their web presence and to help me “diagnose” their issues and

The other day I was running a masterclass for a client who had asked me to help their younger staff understand the boundary between the professional and personal use of social media. The people attending were all recent graduates and were about 23 years old, on average. They had all

This week presented me with a problem I was not expecting. A month ago I wrote an article for a client while I was in a hotel, away at an event. I stored it on Google Drive and sent my client the link to the file.  A day or so

On the way into Reading from my house, there has been an Aldi supermarket trading happily for several years. It has been on its own on the edge of a housing estate and apparently doing well. Several months ago, however, the wasteland next to it started to be developed. A

The chances are you attend business meetings most weeks, if not most days. You also know the problem, don’t you? Most of those meetings that you visit are time-wasters. You probably sit there frustrated that someone is droning on about something inconsequential. You might even get bored and check your

Twice this week I have been asked the same question: what should I pay for a website? Twice this week I have given the same answer: that’s the wrong question…! The reason it is the wrong question is that it is treating the website as though it were a “one-off”

The other day I was lecturing at the University of Buckingham on the potential for new technology to disrupt business. The students are studying for a degree in entrepreneurship, and they are all running “live” companies as part of their studies. They were keen to discover how they could predict

This week Twitter decided to roll out an experiment in which certain people (I’m not one of them) were provided with the opportunity to write Tweets that are twice as long as normal. The company has increased the maximum length of a Tweet from 140 characters to 280.  To understand

Here in the UK, the coming week is “Recycling Week” where a national campaign will invite us all to recycle more. In spite of increased opportunities to recycle, with more roadside collections than ever before, it turns out that Brits are recycling less. And there is a clear psychological reason

There is, it seems to me, a generalised air of cowardice on the Internet. This struck me again when I was in a conversation this week with a delegate who had attended one of my masterclasses on web success for business leaders.  His company was in a traditional sector. Like

Social media is full of hashtags – whoops, sorry – I mean #hashtags. But why? Well, maybe a bit of history will help us understand. Many people think that hashtags were invented by Twitter or someone using the network about seven years ago. While that is true – the first

This week I was with a client when we started discussing a range of services they needed to help them improve their website. “Not more monthly spending,” they said. We chatted for a while about it, and then we realised something. The Internet has quietly crept up on us and

Three times this week the same issue has come up for discussion. Time. Yesterday, I was running an all-day seminar for entrepreneurship students at the University of Buckingham where we explored how they could cope with all the pressures of running an online business. They realised there was a significant

This week I was running a masterclass when I asked what I thought was an easy question. I simply said, “What, exactly, are you hoping to achieve with each item of content on your website?” There was a pause, some puzzled looks and then a mumbled, “What do you mean?”

This week saw a surprising announcement. The person who told the world back in 2003 that we needed to have complex passwords that we changed every 90 days has admitted he was wrong. Security expert Bill Burr now says he was barking up the wrong tree. He is not alone.