Entrepreneurs — looking to grow your business?

Starting this Thursday, June 5, you can learn some of the most current techniques for growing your business in the Escape 9 to 5 Teleseminar Series.

I love what the organizer, Melissa Gerdes, has to say about the series on the registration page:

Why are we doing this? It’s simple. We love our lives and we love helping other people experience the realities of entrepreneurship. So we want to see the wonderful life you create for yourself. (Mostly, we do it because it’s fun.)

The teleseminars will be held on various weekday evenings in the coming weeks, and the first one is…tomorrow! I’ll be doing mine on “Winning on the Social Web” next week. So go ahead and register now so you don’t miss anything.

I’ll be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area May 5-8, and hope that you can attend some of my investor seminars to the Wharton and Columbia Business School Alumni Clubs:

Topic: “Squeezing Blood from a Stone: The Professional Investor’s Guide to Eliciting Information”

Host: Wharton Club of Northern California
Learn how professional investors elicit maximum information in minimum time from industry sources. How do you ask just the right questions to get a CFO to open up and tell you about his company? This training is based on best practices in the intelligence, psychiatric, law enforcement, and journalist communities.
When: Wednesday, May 7th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Location: Perkins Coie, 101 Jefferson Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025
RSVP and more details: http://www.whartonclub.com/article.html?aid=901

Topic: “Where are the Deals? Venture Capitalists, Hedge Funds, and Private Equity Firms’ Best Practices in Deal Creation and Deal Origination”

Host: Columbia Business School Alumni Club of Northern California
What are you doing to identify companies in which you can successfully invest? Learn about recent research on where institutional investors source their investments; how to identify companies with the earmarks of an attractive opportunity; and how to increase your inflow of worthwhile referrals from both intermediaries and investable companies.
When: Thursday, May 8th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Where: Pagemill Partners Auditorium, 2475 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304
RSVP and more details: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=158041

Also, I will be attending the Association for Corporate Growth Grow! Awards on Tuesday, May 6, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View ( https://chapters.acg.org/sv/uploads/events/922FC1DF84A74255B0B429DC3FC81104.pdf ), which may interest many of you.

In the process of working on The Emergence of The Relationship Economy, we had the pleasure to meet and collaborate with Cluetrain Manifesto coauthor and social media visionary Doc Searls. Besides writing a terrific foreword to our book, Doc has also been working with my business partner and coauthor Jay Deragon on several initiatives, including Doc’s Project VRM.

VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and here’s how Doc describes it:

Project VRM is a research and development project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Its purpose is to study and support the development of tools that provide customers with both independence from, and engagement with, vendors. Think of VRM as the way customers relate to vendor CRM (customer relationship management) systems.

Simple concept, profound implications. The past decade since the publication of Cluetrain, we have been moving closer and closer to the point that the customer is really the one in charge of the relationship, not the vendor. Social media is enabling this in new and powerful ways.

The latest issue of Business Week focuses on this new era of customer service, including a great piece, “Consumer Vigilantes“, which recounts several stories of frustrated consumers using blogs, YouTube and other social media to publicly vent (and in most cases, eventually get their problem addressed).

Want to learn more? Next Thursday, February 28, Jay and Doc will be presenting a free webcast on The Impact of Social Media on Selling. You don’t want to miss this!

I enjoyed presenting a few weeks ago to the Harvard Business School Club of London on “Best Practices in Deal-Sourcing by Private Equity, Venture Capital, and Hedge Funds“, generously hosted by McKinsey. You can download my slides here. I look forward to learning more about this area at next week’s Capital Roundtable Masterclass on “The Art of Building the Right Deal Flow“, in New York. I would welcome your feedback.

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing the manuscript of The Go-Giver by my friends Bob Burg and John David Mann. Simply put, this is a great book. I provided a quote for the inside cover:

The Five Laws are beautiful in their simplicity, but it is Mann and Burg’s powerful storytelling that elevates them from the simply motivational to the truly inspirational.

Well, the book is now out, and to try to help push it to the top of the best-seller list, the authors are offering a free copy of their 10-video set, which they normally sell for $297 at their events (and yes, they really do!), if you order it today. The videos are recent — shot in 2007 — and include Bob Burg, John Di Lemme, Stephanie Frank, Christopher Guerrero, Cameron Johnson, Drew Miles, Thom Scott, Bo Short and Al Walker.

This is a heck of a deal. So often these “pushes”, as they’re called, include a bunch of outdated e-books that the authors can’t sell any more. That is simply not the case here.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy the book as much as I did.

I’ll be giving a free webinar Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2-3pm ET, entitled Professional Networking - Beyond Sourcing, sponsored by ERE Media and LinkedIn. The event is intended for recruiters, and the gist of it is this: any hack recruiter can figure out how to search LinkedIn, Jobster, ZoomInfo and the blogosphere to source candidates, but networking is about a lot more than sourcing. We’ll look at how building relationships, not just a contact list, can support your entire business, not just sourcing.

Registration is free but required. Hope to see you there!

I’m happy to be participating at a Software and Information Industry Association lunch /webcast on October 31 in midtown New York, on “The Promises and Risks of Social Networking in the Information Industry”.

The event is on “how your enterprise can profit from social networking: in promotion and marketing, in the development of new products and content creation, and even by making communities one of the services your business offers as an ancillary to content products.”

The other panelists are:

Leslie Forde, VP of Strategic Alliances, Communispace;

Kim Kobza, President and CEO, Neighborhood America;

Scott Parry, General Manager, Reuters Advicepoint

Karen Christensen, CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group will moderate.

Some of the questions that will be addressed include:

• How can we make our communities persistent and sustainable?

• What increases the value of a community to its participants?

• What social media are appropriate for my business?

• Does it really make sense to use existing free social networking communities like Facebook and Second Life?

• Can we develop our own unique social networking systems with open source technologies?

The event costs $50 for non-SIIA members. Alternatively, the event will be available via webcast. Register here.

Christopher Rollyson took some very detailed notes on the recenty New York conference on “Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 in Capital Markets.”

I love free teleclasses. They’re a great way to get an introduction to someone’s material and find out if it’s something you want to pursue further. I also love network marketing (at its best — at its worst I’m as annoyed by it as anybody else). What makes the difference between good network marketing and bad network marketing? Training. More specifically, good training.

So I was really pleased when my friend Gail Stolzenburg called me up and told me about the free MLM teleclass program he’s involved with and invited me to join them and offer a class on building your network online.

Here is a sample of what will be featured for the month of October:

*Discover the virtual handshake to build your network online
*Learn how to prospect like a professional
*Find out the 7 keys to getting all the free publicity you want
*Double your sales
*Know how to recruit with ease, to grow your team today
*Learn about the Irlen Method
*Find out how to manage fear
*Discover how to dump credit card debt
*Find three easy ways on how to empower children financially
*Envision how bio-energetic healing can change your life
*Learn how to deal with people differently
*Uncover the secrets to building your million dollar business
*Become wealthy without a job
*Create breakthroughs in every area of your life
*Know how to select a 6 or 7 figure network marketing opportunity

My class is on October 15, but the next class is Monday, October 1, so if you’d like to learn more, take a look at the detailed class schedule. The classes are free, but pre-registration is required (you can register through the schedule page).