If you ever built a house, you understand the importance of designing the structure or floor plan with an architect before laying the foundation. If you are an attorney, you understand the importance of doing some discovery about your client and case before presenting to a judge.

GUEST BLOGGER: Cheryl Bame, Principal - Bame Public Relations 

Many professionals want to see their names in print, either by being quoted in the press or by writing a bylined article. If you want to take the latter route, then there are some important questions you need to ask yourself before you set out to write your masterpiece. And these questions go beyond the traditional tasks of identifying your target publication and getting your topic approved by an editor.

Sitting at my local watering hole the other night, I struck up a conversation with a person in town on business. Our conversation took a turn when they asked me what I do. When I told them I work remote with a DC-based strategic branding and marketing agency, they went off on a tangent about how successful their employees are that work remote and the benefits of such an arrangement.

GUEST BLOGGER: Kimberly Alford Rice, President - KLA Marketing Associates

Why Firms Should Develop a Strategic Plan

When I work with law firms, which profess to have strategic plans, I find it bewildering that they often are stored in the management teams’ drawers somewhere and rarely are implemented. I scratch my head and ask why bother expending the energy and time to develop a course for the firm if there is no system created to implement the plan. What a colossal waste of everyone’s time and resources.

I enjoy writing blogs like this, and sending out tweets when I run across a great article that I think will be of value to colleagues. However, I must admit that I have stopped tuning in on my TweetDeck on a daily basis. Why? Because I see more and more tweets that simply prattle on about subjects that I don’t have the time or interest in reading. Perhaps I need to go in and clean out my followers and create more robust lists. But this is not my point.

There are articles after articles that speak to the importance of forming partnerships, rather than treating vendors like, well, vendors. Sure, a vendor is a common name for a company that provides a service to you (agencies, printers, technology providers, etc.) but try to think beyond the term and more broadly about what the business should be: a partnership! Most accounting and law firms refer to the professional service firms they use as vendors (we know your services appear on many budgets as line items under the vendor category).

Accounting marketers have swarmed Washington, DC this week for the Association for Accounting Marketers (AAM) annual conference. Sessions have included performance reviews, how to add value to your firm and niche development to marketing audits and online marketing strategy.

GUEST BLOGGER: Larry Bodine Esq., Business Development Advisor 

From Hubspot: We all know our website is a key part of our marketing and lead generation strategy. But when prospects visit your site, what are they looking for? What do they want to see, and what do they consider most important? To find out, RainToday.com surveyed more than 200 buyers of business-to-business services—in companies of all sizes—to rate the importance of various elements of a service provider's website.

Despite sweeping changes in the print landscape, the debate of whether print is dead will be around ad infinitum and has created a riot of controversy between print literary aficionados and bloggers, not to mention panic in the publishing and printing industry. In this decade alone, there has been a monumental shift in having access to online content. It's immediate and informative, but it's only one of several delivery methods. For economical and sustainability reasons, many publications have gone to a strictly online presence.

GUEST BLOGGER: Matthew Gallizzi, CEO - NotixTech

Facebook mobile has over 100 million users and is growing faster than desktops. Morgan Stanley believes that more users will be connected to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years. Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha told Reuters that Android-powered mobile devices are selling faster than they can be manufactured.