For the creator of Chino Latino, Manny's, Oceanaire and a half-dozen more of the Twin Cities' most popular restaurants, success is served with a side order of fun.

Elmer Wheeler is little known today, but he may have coined the most famous marketing phrase ever. "Don't sell the steak – sell the sizzle," he said.

Smart marketers realize that if they can get that core group of engaged Internet users involved with their brands, the One Percenters will actually serve as citizen marketers, delivering brand messages with a genuine passion that can sway other, not-so-involved consumers.

For businesses, a phone app is becoming what a Web site was 10 years ago: a basic entry point into a marketing arena they can't afford to be absent from.

If you're selling a product or a service, and you're not expanding your marketing efforts beyond traditional channels, you risk irrelevance.

The growth of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association testifies to the vibrancy of the Twin Cities as a leader on marketing's digital frontier.

With the legal field growing more competitive and major law firms experiencing unprecedented layoffs in recent years, many are looking more closely at how they can use marketing to reach new clients — and strengthen their relationships with existing ones.

I've written in this space before about the business of communication — the changes wrought by the Internet and its impact on print and broadcast media. Today I'd like to talk about the people who are being affected by those changes.

What to do about gadgets overload? Geeks are cranking away on their computers in basements across the world, creating many programs and applications that will help us get our clients' messages out to the right people. But with the glut of new options, it's getting harder to wade through them all to discover the ones we really need.

Jim Ericson's book is an accessible, thought-provoking collection of stories about business and living, designed to stimulate conversation about thinking differently.