Dania McDermott

What makes us shy away from sharing feedback with our bosses?

Do we avoid it because we fear it will fall on deaf ears? Or is it because we worry it will make us seem unhappy in our roles?

According to HBR, it’s a bit of both.

As a designer, it's easy to get caught between your creative process and your deadlines.

You identify a problem, devise the solution, and iterate. It's not always efficient, but you plow ahead anyway.

Productive meetings don’t happen on their own.

From technology issues to conversations that go nowhere, most meeting inefficiencies are avoidable with proper planning.

Meeting notes are a prime example.

Creativity is a slippery notion.

For some, it’s an intangible concept. For others, it’s a talent limited to the production of specific works: novels, paintings, graphics, and sculptures.

This definition persists even in business, where creativity is often seen as a skill set exclusive to design or marketing teams.

The lines between customer service and marketing have blurred.

From customers seeking help on social to the growing focus on brand advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing, there’s never been a better time for these teams to make friends.

But at most organizations, the divide between customer service and marketing remains firmly intact.

To maximize your team’s success with UGC, consider these common challenges before getting started.

Email is the lifeblood of daily-deal sites.

Groupon became one of the fastest-growing tech companies in history due, at least in part, to its highly targeted emails. And LivingSocial founder Tim O’Shaughnessy credited the company’s success with leveraging consumers’ emails.

Today, the flash sale lives on at DailySale, whose burgeoning ecommerce site boasts steep discounts on a wide range of popular products.

Joe Pulizzi knows events. His company’s annual conference, Content Marketing World, is not only the largest content marketing event on the planet, it’s also the reason CMI makes money.

“Most of the content produced is used for education and moving people through the buyer’s journey. Events is where we see the revenue and profit.”

But CMI didn’t jump straight into Content Marketing World. It built a loyal databas...

In today's tech renaissance, data is everywhere and it seems like it can do everything. It flows in torrents from tens of billions of connected devices and empowers brands to offer truly customized advertising, marketing, and customer service.

But does data have a dark side?

Digital advertisers spend as much as 20% of their ad budget selling to penniless robots.

That's according to ad verification company Adloox whose research indicates that fraud is on the rise and worsening.

The newest breed of bots armed with machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) are dissolving the final barriers to fraud-prevention. They're so adept at mimicking human behavior - from cursor patterns to misspelled words - that advertisers can't distinguish the two.

Top outbound reps don’t reach the #1 spot by waiting in line.

They skip everything that doesn’t move real deals forward. That includes the pointless check-ins, the moonshot deals, and the customers who are happy to talk but will never buy.

Their success has nothing to do with callousness, luck, or speed, and everything to do with prioritization.

Account management is like a game of cat-and-mouse: Customers only surface when they need something. When it’s time to renew, they’re often nowhere to be found.

From exotic travels to cuddly animals, there’s plenty to prepare for.

USA Today recently reported that Millennials would rather enjoy the present than prepare for the future. Similarly, Bloomberg suggested Millennials aren’t buying life insurance because they’re taking longer to hit milestones that usually trigger purchasing a policy––like getting married and having kids.

Residents of Michigan can now use a Will to specify who should assume ownership of their digital assets once they die. This is exciting for a few reasons.

Here's the scenario: Someone who was once close enough to inflict major pain has died -- and you’re charged with writing the death notice or delivering the eulogy.

Do you pander to the crowd with pleasantries about the deceased, or forge ahead with the truth for the sake of being honest?