I’ve taken a big risk. I’ve decided to merge two separate groups of people: people who subscribe to this blog, and people who subscribe to my increasingly infrequent but more formal html newsletter. This could either see a mass ‘unsubscribe’ as the expectations of one group are not met, or else it will be ‘Business [...]
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M y friend and colleague Shel Holtz is the latest in a lengthening line of Comms bloggers singled out for criticism by La Strump. In his rather erudite post, Hiding behind the facade, Shel goes to some length to politely rebuke a personal attack. The Strump then decides to attack not only Shel, but one [...]
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T his joke is millenniums old, but worth repeating, as Anders did a couple of weeks ago. But it was Merry Elrick‘s comment/follow-up punchline that cracked me up! Herewith the joke and Merry’s punchline: You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You go up to her and say, [...]
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I’m willing to try anything at the moment. Now that Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is out and about, I’ll use it to replace my frustrating experience (yes, another one!) with Firefox. Firefox works perfectly for about a month, then simply ceases to function. It opens up to a blank screen, no buttons work, no [...]
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Brad Whitworth over at the IABC employee comms blog points to a new book by Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations. I haven’t read the book myself, but Brad reckons that the sort of in-your-face, open conversations that Susan suggests might be the way to go… “Some people are ready for that sort of personal or organizational [...]
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My mate Trevor Cook has a chapter in a soon-to-be-released book on, guess what… Okay — blogging and PR! Darn, you guessed If you want anyone to review it, Trevor, you know the address (but just in case, here it is again, in a shameless pitch for a freebie/review copy) PO Box 1129, Stirling, 5152 [...]
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Courtesy of some dear friends that I’ve known since high school (some 30-something years), I got hold of a long-cherished album on cd. I only had the vinyl version of ‘Status Quo Live’ and hadn’t listened to it in years. But with the arrival of the borrowed cd version I could load up my mp3 [...]
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W OW! It sure got heated for a while… I was ready to put on my boxing gloves and wade into very murky mud in defence of Allan… I detested seeing a colleague and friend get slandered by another colleague who has the oxygen of newsprint. The flames coming out of Crescenzo’s mouth were pretty [...]
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In a blinding example of RTFM, I have configured my GreatNews rss aggregator/news reader and Zoundry offline blog editor to work together. [Update: read this 'how to'] I downloaded and installed the latest version of GreatNews and tried the ‘blog it’ text link, still to no avail. But then I tried again, selecting ‘configure…’ instead [...]
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I am at a loss to explain why ‘tuna casserole’ should figure so highly in a list of search terms folks have used to find my blog. It’s number two of the search terms used in the last month! Bizarre. But it seems that images of Sven are indeed in hot demand. If you have [...]
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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!
