Who is really your friend?

Your dog.

Let’s start with your best friend.

Dogs are not fickle, they don’t lie, and they stick by you.

Mark Twain said, “If heaven went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would get in.”

Lest you take me as a hopeless misanthrope, know that it ain’t so. I love people.

And yet I find dogs often more reliable (you can see my “Pugs of Persuasion”, Rollo Tamasi and Parker, in the photo above).

A good friend of mine and longtime private client – whose name you would recognize but I shall withhold (for reasons soon obvious), phoned me recently. He wanted some help with headlines to test on a new promotion.

We talked about a campaign that went sour on him a couple years ago.

At that time a number of “friends”, who had supported said campaign, attacked him in a public forum. Mostly, it seemed, as a way to make themselves look better.

“I sure learned who my real friends were,” he told me. “And I won’t forget it.”

My hope for you is it won’t take a “problem” like this for you to figure out this vital information.

Find out now who you friends are. Or they may turn on you in a crucial moment someday… hoping to throw you on the altar in order to save their own skins or to feather their own nest.

Worth knowing: who is who.