Yesterday at a breakfast hosted by Business Chicks, hundreds of women tweeted quotes from guest speaker Ita Buttrose.

The hashtag was #businesschicks and #itabuttrose. It's impact was for all to see, as the event was trending somewhere in the social media sphere and people who had never heard of Ita Buttrose from all over the world, were joining the 'trend' and retweeting tweets related to her speech. Such is the power of a #hashtag and of course, my favourite social media platform, Twitter.

What is a hashtag?

I am not sure about you, but Jodie Foster is one of my all time favourite actresses. For me, she is an actress with integrity, talent and professionalism. Never has she sold her soul for a role and she is always the first to stand up for her friends. First it was Mel Gibson, then it was Robert Downey Jnr and now it is Kristen Stewart.

Figures released last showed the worst retail growth in fifty years as consumers deserted shops again in the end of financial year sales.

The 1.6 per cent annual rise in spending is the worst result since 1961-62 - an era when there were no credit cards and shoppers used pounds, shillings and pence.

The Bureau of Statistics revealed sales for the normally strong month of June had fallen by 0.1 per cent, following an 0.6 per cent drop in May.

Here's my take...

I don't know about you, but egomaniacs scare the 'b'jesus out of me'. I am terrified of them, but still I find myself sucked into their web of soul destroying destruction.

As much as they are charming, good at 'selling a story' and surrounded by people, they are manipulative, obsessive and bullies.

By definition (Wikipedia), egomania is an obsessive preoccupation with one's self and applies to someone who follows their own ungoverned impulses and is possessed by delusions of personal greatness and feels a lack of appreciation. 

If we believe what we read, then the world is stuffed. Literally. More debt than the Great Depression and unemployment is at an all time high - what else could we possibly be doing to destroy our world.

Yet, there are people who don't look down the barrel of pessimism and they continue on a path of global dominance and financial reward.

For 2 minutes I had to check my facebook account to see if I had access to a client's administration from my log-in and up pops a post from Donna Hay. For those of you that sleep under a rock, Donna Hay is probably the most famous and incredible Australian Chef around.

It's fair to say that marketing strategies don't work by themselves. You can spend thousands of dollars having a marketing strategy written for your small business, but if it isn't implemented, it's not worth the paper it is written on.

There are thousands of marketing companies in Australia. They range from one-man bands, to small and mid tier agencies, right through to large multinationals.

For small businesses, it is very hard for many entrepreneurs or business managers to ascertain what is the best marketing solution for their business and what will help them get to the next level.

As a business owner and entrepreneur, it is paramount to understand our competitors and do the complete opposite to what they are doing.

It's no different to Justin Bieber, the Venture Capitalist, reportedly having earned $108 million over the past two years investing in tech startups like Spotify - becoming complacent because you think you have made it or everything is going swimmingly well, could be your biggest downfall. 

There is a reason why this marketing blog has been neglected and it's not something that I particularly wanted to share.

And, to some extent, I won't.

However, today I received in the mail a book and it was a reminder that 'everything happens for a reason'.

I travelled around the world twice in six weeks for business and when you do such an exhaustive trip like that, twice, you immediately get a feeling that 'it had better be worth it'. Fortunately, it always is. Afterall, its a journey and when we embark on any journey with an open and honest mind, we move that step forward to realising whatever it is that we were meant to realise.