As anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be in one of my writing classes can attest, I am a strong advocate of the idea that ‘story’ is crucial to the eventual success of your communication. It’s just that we business communicators don’t have the luxury of 400+ pages to tell that story. So what [...]
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I’ve mentioned before the importance of reading your email out loud before you send it (the link is on my old blog which seems to have gone down as I type this). Reading your email out loud serves several ends: It enables you to have a final ‘check and balance’ pause It enables you to [...]
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The ever-wonderful Kathy Sierra points off to despair.com and makes my day! Go to this page and click on the menu items on the left — ‘Beauty’, ‘Compromise’, etc — and marvel at the images presented before you. Fantastic! [Update] Go to this page and see more posters like this: Sheer genius! Tweet
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If we accept that story telling has been the main way of communicating with each other since when Adam and Eve first decided to fill up their time making babies and that our brains are hard-wired to create and receive stories — and I think we should — then we should ask what the main [...]
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Obviously a man with a well-stuffed couch, the Copenhagian Connoisseur of Collectable Detritus, Monsieur Jenkins, has once again uncovered a cracker. Digging between the cushions for some spare change, he has uncovered a stunner of a newspaper article from 1995. In the article, Carsten Graff waxes lyrical about how effing useless the internet is, the [...]
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Today is Australia Day. Yes, I’m proud! Related Technorati posts: Australia, Australia Day Tweet
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Dubai with a blue sky — this was rare while I was here Well, my training course is over — I gave them the best information I could; now it’s up to them to do something with it. They seemed to like the material and my presentation style, which is nice. After all, one [...]
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I know he said he was taking some time off to rethink his online strategy. I know he had a burst of posting activity a couple of weeks ago. But does anyone else miss his style, his wisdom, his panache and his humour? Where are you, Mr Jenkins? Related Technorati posts: Allan Jenkins Tweet
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…you remember every single one of these Top 10 web fads as if it were yesterday. Oh, I have been around too long… But this is still my favourite, after all these years. Tweet
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Measuring the Impact and ROI of Social Media - NEW
Making Social Media Work for Your Business
Social Media: The New Communication Landscape - for Ark Group
How to get started with podcasting in your organisation - for Melcrum Publishing
Contributing author to:
Best practices in social media governance
How to use social media to solve critical internal communication issues
How to communicate with hard-to-reach employees - for Melcrum Publishing
How to use social media to engage employees - for Melcrum Publishing
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Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John Havens.
A belter of a book and a 'must read' addition to any communicator's bedside reading table if they are serious about introducing social media into their communication plans. It includes a fabulous chapter on transparency and business (hint: you want to photocopy it and give it to your CEO!)
Qualitative Communication Research Methods by Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor.
Not just a book for academics, it's chock-full of great ideas on how to effectively and efficiently research your employees, customers, the marketplace and other stakeholders
The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein.
A fabulous book that gives a clear, clean overview of what Twitter is and WHY you should be engaging with it. THEN it goes into depth with so many tips and ideas that they should have sold the book for twice the price!
Practical SEO Copywriting: a ‘must get’ book. My mate Glenn Murray has written a bottler of a new book on search engines and copywriting.
In a cunning twist of bizarre nomenclature, he’s titled it Practical SEO Copywriting. The cheeky little fox! It’s a DIY guide to writing online copy for both human readers AND for that 400kg gorilla we lovingly call ‘Google’.
The danger, Glenn quite rightly …err …writes is that focusing too much attention on all of the supposed SEO ‘tricks of the trade’ will make your copy all but unreadable by the human brain. You know, all that stuff bandied about by the so-called SEO (search engine optimisation) experts: keyword frequency, exact string versus individual words scattered across the page, page length, alt tags, header tags, and so on.
Not that this stuff isn’t important – it all is, and more besides – but Glenn argues persuasively that by far more important is the ability to write copy that people will actually want to read – and link to!
