Most Recent Blog Posts

Do Your Employees Follow You on Social Media?

I treat Facebook and Twitter pretty differently – I use Twitter (@janinepopick) for business and Facebook for both. I am somewhat selective when it comes to whom I accept as a Facebook friend. But with Twitter, I think the more followers, the better. If you follow me on Twitter, I pretty much set the scene for what I’ll be posting. Continue Reading.

How a Revamped Office Environment Can Boost Company Morale

My e-mail marketing company, VerticalResponse, is growing steadily. We're lucky; we've got great customers and great employees. Serving non-profits and small businesses gives us a charge, especially since we know we're helping them survive and grow.  Continue Reading.

Is it Time to Rethink your Job Interview Questions?

Recently an article was published on www.mainstreet.com about the Ten Companies with the Toughest Interview Questions, questions that would make anyone nervous if they were put on the spot and asked these questions in a job interview.  The idea is to see how people think on their feet, how they decipher a problem or issue, and how they go about processing a problem.  It's not necessarily about if they got the answer "right" (many of the questions don't even have a right answer), but... Continue Reading.

5 Tips to Ensure Customers Pay You On Time

No one likes doing work and not being paid for it. Yet let's face it: We business owners know it happens all the time.  RocketLawyer.com recently released a survey of 475 members of its website: 25 percent had trouble collecting payments, and of those, 60 percent had to write off bad debt. As a bonus, the survey release included Rocket Lawyer's tips for getting paid. I thought they were worth passing on: Continue Reading.

Go Big or Go Home?

One of the first things another entrepreneur said to me when I was getting feedback on the viability of FamiliesGo! was that I ought to think about whether I want to keep things small or “go big.” Continue Reading.

LinkedIn's Big Problem: Most People Waste Their Time

From the November 6, 2011 New York Times profile of Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and one of Silicon Valley's current golden gods of community building… Continue Reading.

Klout Score FAIL

I’ve been on Klout practically since it first started.  Klout measures your online influence by analyzing your social media activity, such as Twitter and Facebook.  When I first started, my Klout score was around 30.  Now I’m up to around 50 because I engage more on Twitter through retweeting, replying, and posting interesting content that gets my tweets retweeted.  Continue Reading.

Russell Simmons Silences 150 Entrepreneurs

Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, Phat Farm, Argyle Culture, The Hip Hop Summit Action Network, Unirush Financial Services and much more, led 150 members of the Greater New York business owners community in a silent 5-minute meditation exercise at The Lighthouse International Theater on East 59th Street in Manhattan yesterday. Continue Reading.

Small Business Optimism is Back

The fledgling economy can knock us down, but small business isn’t having it. Small business optimism leapt 20 percentage points in October, according to the SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard, which measures payroll data of 35,000 small businesses across the country. This, despite the fact that nationally—for over a year now—small business hiring has been flat or down.The SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard has told the story repeatedly now for 13 months.  With... Continue Reading.

Be Two Steps Ahead in Innovation

I am always looking for new ways to be innovative.  I love that through Inc, I get the chance to speak with so many experts on innovation, such as Clayton Christensen, Sunni Brown, Adrian Slywotzky and Geoffrey Moore.  These experts shake up my initial notions on innovation and inspire me to try new techniques with my company.  So when I came across Mark Proffitt’s predictive innovation workshop, I was very intrigued.  Imagine being able to predict what... Continue Reading.

Areas of Your Business You Should Be Testing

You go into a dressing room with 10 pairs of jeans to try on, even though you just need one. You take off the ones you're wearing – your beloved pair that fits so well. You try all 10 pairs and luckily one of them fits as well, if not better, than the pair you thought you could never replace. You feel that after pulling on all those jeans, you know what works for you. You have a winner. Continue Reading.

How Analytics Drive My Web Strategy

I kind of love Google Analytics. I’m just beginning to plumb its depths and it only starts to be really helpful after you’ve built enough traffic to show patterns.  Continue Reading.