I’m not planning to start celebrating Thanksgiving, but I will start acting in this holiday’s spirit: remembering everything great in my life and being thankful for it. So here are some really cool people and events in my life that I am deeply indebted for.

My family – the one I’ve been born into and the one I working on creating. They are all great and in their own way helped me achieve whatever I set my mind to.

My friends – an amazingly vivid and eclectic group of wonderful people that I’ve met around the world. No, I don’t differentiate between online and offline friends, but when online, I know who my friends are, not everyone chatting with me or sending me cool stuff to read is my friend. Yet

Kayla - the little lab puppy I finally got! I am a dog fanatic, yet only owned two when I was in secondary school. I’m happy and thankful I was able to get her and give her a home full of love (and dog toys and dog hair and dog stuff ).

My career and where it’s going – I’m extremely close to a dream come true, something I’ve been secretly wishing for since high school. And I have been blessed with the support and constant encouragement of some wonderful people.

My life in general – It’s not always perfect, there’s always room for better, but generally, I am doing great! I’ve accomplished everything mostly on my own, with the help of family and friends and Lady Luck, but I never needed someone to find a job for me, find me some people to hang out with, pull me out of tremendous crises and I’ve generally been keeping far from destructive habits. All listed above deserve a big fat thank you for this final point!

What are you thankful for?

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When you think of marketing a product or a service, you have to consider what kind of issues it will help your customer with. But just telling them what problems you’re solving might not be very convincing. You need to also show how it all works. So what can you do: talk to your current customers and start writing a few case studies. Then move along to publishing a few testimonials on your site.

But when you’re new, there aren’t hordes of customers to show off. And even when there are, they might not be cool enough to draw that much attention. So what can you do then? Well, it’s easy: scan the papers, magazines, portals and blogs for news on a problem you could solve popping up in the life of someone important. A star, a state department, some sort of royalty, there are dozens of possibilities. Continue reading

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

I’m extremely happy to welcome you to the first Monday Reading Roundup after our big move that kept me quiet for longer than I wanted . So without any other service interruption, here’s my list for today.

Have you always wanted to know what the secret formula to a successful business is? Your search has ended: Cath Lawson’s just made it public knowledge.

While so many out there have proclaimed print newspapers dead and burried, Shel Holtz has identified 10 changes that could save them.

If you have a site or a blog or both, you monitor your traffic. And admit it, higher numbers make you happier. But are you also mislead by traffic and driven to monitor the wrong metric? Dawud Miracle warns us against being tricked by the wrong numbers.

Ian Lurie is at it again and brings you a fresh and funny lesson on internet marketing. It’s about big crowds and how they don’t always have the smart solution.

We’ve all made mistakes. In business, these mistakes cost us our customers’/clients’ trust. Liz Strauss described the kind of apologies that help rebuild this lost trust.

In the end, I’ll spice up this weeks edition with Karen Swim’s reading recommendations. It’s a list of 5 wonderful blogs that I’m currently exploring (except the first one, that’s already in my reader).

Don’t forget to add your own suggestions to the comment box! See you all next week!

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or How never to teach marketing

Disclaimer: this post was written last Saturday during class. But as I was blogless at that time, it’s only know being published.

Two weeks ago, a student of the Romanian American University(RAU), Tourism Economy department, had a wonderful weekend. Finally, inspiring professors (two of them actually) and some really cool things to actually bother researching. Something fresh and new and not lost in the mist of centuries past. Then the new head of this private institution stopped by to tell us how things were changing: an increased level of education, more asked from the students. Anyway, it sounded impressive. So impressive I bought it, most of it anyway.

Then this weekend came. I was looking forward to my Marketing class. I mean, it’s marketing, I love it, it should be wonderful! Well, I’m currently in the middle of a disaster. The class is boring, it only speaks of old concepts and dusty theory. Where are the cool tricks, the case studies, and the engaging presentation? It’s marketing for God’s sake! This is one teacher that should know more about giving students what they need and want. Continue reading

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Yes, after a quite bumpy two weeks ride, Words of a Broken Mirror is once again up and running! It took two weeks to get a new hosting account, backup my old files and get the answered approved, two days for my to partly import stuff on my new account and majorly screw everything up and about 2 hours for Alex to get everything sorted out and clean up my mess .

While my blog was down and I couldn’t share anything with you through posts and comments, I realized that this blog is such an important part of my life that I really wouldn’t want to live without it. I could, but why would I ever? So many friends, so many thoughts, so many moments, why waste something like that?

Again, I apologize for the down time and for all the hassle you might have encountered when trying to access my blog. Hope you quickly forgive me and get back to regular visits.

P.S. From what Twhirl shows up, Joanna Young was the first to comment after the move! Thanks so much for that!

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