One of the most common push-backs on investing in a community manager is the uncertain return on investment. Why hire for community when you could hire an acquisition marketer — particularly given that the ROI on social media is next to none for sales? It’s pretty easy to ignore high churn rates when investors are […]

People often say that finding a mentor is essential as an entrepreneur, especially if you’re young. I am a junior at Duke University and the co-founder of Star Toilet Paper, so the experience I had prior to starting this company includes camp and caddying work. How do I even know what steps to take or […]

Our friends at the Young Entrepreneurship Council asked ten entrepreneurs to share how they spur creative thinking — both internally and throughout their team. Here’s what they found: Mind mapping works like a champ “Start with a topic or question, and mindmap your way around it. Don’t censor yourself as you come up with all the surrounding […]

About two months ago, Jeni Hinojosa, our lead social media strategist at EMSI Public Relations, started noticing interesting changes involving the Twitter accounts we manage. Tools were suddenly disabled. Twitter’s technical support, which hadn’t been good, improved. So, when news broke on September 24 that Twitter had already formally taken steps toward going public back […]

Early stage companies are understandably excited to demonstrate their concept, whether to friends, potential investors, or their office-mates. In fact, it may be essential to their survival to do so, since they can’t attract investors and users without showing them what they’re doing. But companies that are considering patent protection for their concepts should be […]

While many business challenges are common for all founders, there are unique lessons that women entrepreneurs have the opportunity to learn in business. Here are several essential lessons I’ve learned as a successful female entrepreneur and what every female founder should know along the way: 1. Own your success There are several things that, as […]

In today’s startup marketplace, we tend to overvalue founding teams with experience building technology products and undervalue teams with domain expertise in the particular market being addressed. Let’s consider two fictional founders, Bill & Ted, creating two different startups to attack the same market: Bill is a great engineer. He worked at Google for 5 […]

“Enterprise technology” and “beautiful design” aren’t typically used in the same sentence. But just because the application is made for IT-users, doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful or easy to use. Believe me, I know – I relied on that kind of software earlier in my career as a data analyst. What exactly does enterprise […]