Start with Hello: How to Convert Today's Stranger into Tomorrow's Client

About the author

Hello! I’m Linda Coles, an international speaker and author with short spiky hair. I run a small company called Blue Banana and mainly work from my home office on a fig orchard in New Zealand. Paul is the love of my life, Stella and Monkey are my two cats and Daisy and Molly are my two goats.

My background is mainly in retail management working in some of the UK’s biggest retailers, but life in the slower lane beckoned and so Paul and I moved to green pastures south of Auckland. The slower life never really happened, and I continue to work with some really great brands by helping them to build relationships with their customers online.

I speak a great deal and write about building relationships, an important part of being successful in business, and I wrote the book Learn Marketing with Social Media in 7 Days in 2011. I also write regularly as one of only 220 LinkedIn influencers, along with Richard Branson, Barack Obama and Arianna Huffington, which sounds very grand and I am very honoured to have been asked.

Mark Twain once said ‘The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why’. And Albert Einstein said ‘I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots’. I guess I have made it my purpose, my ‘find out why’, to keep people talking to each other, to help them become less focused on their smart phone and more interested in what and who is around them ...