At Harvard Business Review

3 ways you can use Pinterest

March 5, 2012

In my Friday post for Harvard Business Review, I provided companies with some ideas about how they could use Pinterest to connect with customers. Today, I want to suggest 3 ways to use Pinterest personally: Compile a list of purchases before deciding what to buy; or use it compile a snapshot of your style that [...]

For Harvard Business book: How do you reward yourself at work?

February 3, 2012

How do you reward or motivate yourself to complete a task or project? I’m tackling this question in one of my pieces for a forthcoming edition of Harvard Business Review’s Getting the Right Work Done. And I’d love your help. Maybe you’re the kind of person who takes a five minute break every time you check [...]

What the Internet did for you in 2011

December 23, 2011

My year-end post for the Harvard Business Review asked the question, What did the Internet do for you this year? In that post, I wrote: Appreciating the moments when our online work and lives just click tells us that all this time we spend online is not a compulsion, but a well-deserved choice. And noticing the [...]

11 social media tools that put entrepreneurs on the right strategic path

May 31, 2011

My latest post for the Harvard Business Review was inspired by a trip I made to Romania earlier this spring. I visited Bucharest and Cluj as part of the School for Startups, a highly successful UK-based entrepreneurship program created by Doug Richard. S4S is running in two different Romanian cities this year, with about a [...]

The Core Tenets of the Social Web, 25 years in the making

April 11, 2011

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review. We like to think of the social web as green fields in which we are just now sowing best practices and first principles. After all, if there are no hard-and-fast rules, then anything goes. We get to come up with our own laws and axioms and [...]

Santa goes to Best Buy

December 16, 2010

Early adopters are the hardest folks to shop for. As an early adopter married to yet another early adopter, we struggle to find good gifts, since we own every gadget we need, and many we don’t. That’s why you’ve got to surprise us with something so new that it hasn’t yet arrived at Best Buy. [...]

5 ways to make your time online more fulfilling

July 26, 2010

“I don’t understand how you can spend so much time online. Most of what I see online sickens me.” “Like what?” “Oh you know…porn. Spam. Stupid Facebook quizzes. Endless advertising.” I couldn’t help smiling as this conversation unfolded at the café table next to mine. It’s a conversation I’ve heard all-too-often: less-wired friends condemning the [...]

5 practices to humanize online communication

July 16, 2010

What does it mean to take online life seriously as real life? Here’s another reason to reject the idea of “IRL” (“In Real Life”) as the opposite of life online. When you visualize the real person you’re about to e-mail or tweet, you bring human qualities of attention and empathy to your online communications. That’s [...]