Guest post by Lior Levin The Baby Boomer generation remains a critically important demographic for marketers that can drive higher sales numbers if reached effectively. Marketing firm Coming of Age Incorporated clearly lays out the benefits of marketing to boomers: “At more than 100 million strong, baby boomer and older customers (born before 1965) are the [...]
{ 0 comments }
Wherever you go online, you’re accustomed to using various apps and multimedia tools that help schedule events, perform tasks and communicate better with others. Companies that want to provide top customer support clearly need to study and implement these technologies into their own websites. VeriShow, a real-time live help solution, has done just that, by [...]
{ 0 comments }
I know, I know… Thomas Dolby is nothing to do with business communication, but my musical hero is conducting a whistle-stop trip to Sydney and it’s the perfect opportunity for musos and Thomas-philes to recharge their musical batteries. For those of you who may not know, Thomas first broke into the charts in the early [...]
{ 2 comments }
Before you launch your first online promotion, be aware that there are many regulations governing contests enforced both by Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
{ 0 comments }
If you want to be taken seriously on the social network where professional people hang out, you’d better make sure your spelling is up to scratch. Spell check your work before you hit ‘publish’ on your adverts
{ 0 comments }
I haven’t had so much fun driving in ages. Honestly. I love everything about this car (well, almost)… Review of the Holden Cruze Series II hatchback The stereo system is excellent, the handling is great, the ride is firm but not bone-shattering, the air-conditioning is up for Australia’s conditions… Sure, it doesn’t fit adults in [...]
{ 0 comments }
There are hundreds of thousands of photographers, both professional and amateur, who have created images that can make you sing, laugh, cry, or like the polar bear above, rage against the machine
{ 0 comments }
My FIR colleague Dan York posted last year about a neat way to put promo video presentations together really quickly. Says Dan: So our CEO Jonathan Taylor, who has been experimenting a lot with Prezi lately, whipped up a quick Prezi to explain what happens. A group of us collectively tweaked it a small bit [...]
{ 0 comments }
Participants will learn how to utilise proven methodologies, tips, techniques and observations to ethically increase sales volumes, profit margin, income, customer satisfaction, time and job satisfaction whilst reducing stress and effort
{ 0 comments }
Subscribe to my business communication newsletter and receive a FREE version of my highly-regarded report, 'Master the Art and Science of Twitter for Business' (that sells for $79)
Statistics for this site are courtesy of StatCounter.com
Last month:
Visitors : 8,788
Daily av. : 283
Statistics for my site with
200+ articles on business communication
Last month:
Visitors : 14,999
Daily av. : 484
I recently picked up a copy of Bob Bly’s excellent ‘Super Productivity for Writers’ e-book and wanted to share with you some of his gems.
Here’s his seven common time wasters that he says writers (and I say everybody) should avoid:
1. Excessive blogging (more than 10 minutes per day) – unless that’s your job, of course!
2. Random web surfing (continuing to surf after you’ve found the information you need)
3. Attending meetings of writers groups, marketing clubs, etc. You can learn and network, but you lose half a day
4. Social or business lunches with other writers, editors, publishers, clients. A waste of time and you can lose nearly half a day
5. Volunteering for committees and similar activities. Every hour you spend on administrative nonsense is an hour you don’t write
6 .Sending or receiving jokes, photos, videos and other junk content via email (or my pet hate – Facebook requests to add time-sucking applications or join groups of no interest to me). Stop wasting other people’s time and yours
7 .Letting a ringing phone interrupt your writing. Get caller ID and call them back when you have finished (or better yet, set the phone’s ringing tone volume to ‘silent’ and get an answer machine to take the call for you)
Even though Bob is focusing his material on writers, of which he is a superb one, the advice found on page 22 of his book applies to all of us methinks.
As he points out on page 21, with an average lifespan of seventy- five years, we have only 27,375 days from the time we are born until the time we die. And since we’re asleep for a third of that time, we have only 18,250 days we’re actually awake and active.
How you spend this finite amount of time is mostly up to you. To maximise your productivity, income and output as a writer, writing must be a priority.
If you prefer to garden, that’s perfectly fine; but don’t complain that your colleague who spends those hours in front of the pc is getting more work done than you are. It’s your choice.
Wise words, indeed. Get a copy of this brilliant book and be careful out there…
I love Bob’s material – as I write I have 26 of his publications, each a worthy addition to my knowledge library.
Bob Bly is the man McGraw-Hill calls 'America's top copywriter.' Bob has written copy for more than 100 companies including Boardroom, Phillips, IBM, Medical Economics, AlliedSignal, and Lucent Technologies. He is the author of more than 60 books and a columnist for DM News and Early to Rise.
Making Social Media Work for Your Business - just published!
Social Media: The New Communication Landscape - for Ark Group
How to get started with podcasting in your organisation - for Melcrum Publishing
Contributing author to:
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
These links open in new browser window
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!
