Just take a look at your Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections. The thing that will jump out at you is the number of friends or connections you have in common with others in the marketing world. Just like a good reputation travels, a bad one travels even more quickly. The incestuous nature of our business takes on the same properties of a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business, both good and bad alike.

As an example of one of my least proud moments, there is one that sticks out that I experienced a year ago. I had sent two people from my team to ad:tech San Francisco, and I was unable to attend because of the birth of my daughter. When I came back after a week off, I had to hear from the people on my team about running into a sales executive from an ad network. They started off the conversation, and when the ad executive realized that they were with AccuQuote, he proceeded to recount a phone conversation where I "tore him a new one" for several minutes because of something that went terribly wrong with our campaign a few years ago. Not exactly the way that I want to be brought up in conversation, and I can't say I would feel any differently in his shoes.

This not only applies to ending existing relationships, but this same thing can happen in regards to how you treat others who cold-call you. I used to be very short and sometimes downright rude, when I would receive cold calls. With the number of cold calls increasing as our budget continues to grow, frustration inevitably sets in. If you read my cold call article, my frustration at the continuous flow of interruptions is obvious. I've run into people who have cold called me early in their career, and their impression of me is justifiably jaded. The golden rule -- do onto others as you would have them do onto you -- is a good rule of thumb to live by, especially in an industry where news travels quickly.