Having just met Mike on Monday morning of this week, it’s apparent things sometimes move fast. Recorded this podcast on Monday afternoon!

I ran across Mike online and found his Twitter account, where one of his posts indicated he was having trouble with some WordPress formatting issues. I sent a note to him telling him I had a lot of experience with WordPress (this blog is on a WP platform) and offered to help if I could.

Ended up chatting with him on the phone and connecting on several levels – you’ll hear it in the conversation. Turns out Mike has just released a book, so he’s officially an ‘author’ – the book is “Rock The World With Your Online Presence” and has been out about a month.

The book is about connecting via LinkedIn – in fact, it’s so specific, it’s about how to connect by making your LinkedIn profile rock. And nothing else.

Check the book here: Rock The World Book

Follow Mike on Twitter

What are your favorite online stopping points? What newsletters do you receive are ‘must-read’ material? We all have our favorites that we gravitate to – and those that we try out for awhile and eventually discard. With so much free online reading material, anything that becomes a regular stopping point is worth sharing. Tim and Roger discuss their favorite blogs, website and newsletters.

Links to what we discussed (go ahead and click while listening – you’ll open up a new window and the podcast discussion will keep playing):

• Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook
• Seth Godin’s Blog
• Jeffrey Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine
• Joan Stewart’s Publicity Hound
• HelpaReporter.com
• Kevin Hogan
• Roy H. Williams’ Monday Morning Memo
• BNET – Business Network
• LinkedIn.com
• The Leaders Institute
• Ideal Communications

Now that I’m 95% finished with Peter Shankman’s “Can We Do That!?” I can safely tell you it’s one of the most inspirational business-promotion books I’ve ever found.

Peter, if you’re not familiar with him, is the founder of The Geek Factory PR Agency in New York City in the 90s. He’s since sold the business (but kept the naming rights) and runs Help A Reporter, the largest free source repository for journalists anywhere in the world, where anyone can sign up to be a source on any topic and get quoted in major media.

Now, to the book: a brisk read; I’m a little more than a week into it and have just the last chapter.

The most useful part of the book to me was to lift the hood on a handful of major successful promotions Peter and the Geek Factory pulled off, including the great skydiving adventure, the knitting shop promotion and his 30th birthday party in 2002 (among others).

For someone who’s never done those types of promotions from scratch, it’s great to see how they were hatched and ultimately executed.

Yes, this fun-to-read book gave me a ton of ideas, and I’m still making notes to incorporate some of those ideas into current promotions that I have on the drawing board.

A critical section of the book looks closely at how to deal with a PR crisis: what to say (and what NOT to say) to the media, how to keep the company employees in the loops, how to create a list of contact information for the key players in any company (no, it’s not just the company management).

In other words, when you get that 3 am phone call – which I agree with Peter are NEVER good – you know what to do, step-by-step to avoid becoming the latest company to get chewed up by media…who after all, are just following a story.

I’m almost sorry I will finish the book later today. Guess I’ll have to keep it handy for reference. Yup, I give this valuable little book 4 stars. Add it to your library soon:

Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work--And Why Your Company Needs Them